China Airborne by James Fallows Page A

China—well, that is an achievement in itself, since generally they have been controlled by the military and are viewed as too sensitive for foreigners to see. But if you could look, you’d see at once that the areas
not
controlled by the military are relatively thin, crabbed corridors connecting the biggest cities. All the rest has been off limits to everyone except the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
    There was another important structural difference in China’s approach: the centralized power of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC, which played nearly all of thevaried and sometimes conflicting roles that Western countries kept carefully divided among different official and agencies. In China, the reins were in one set of hands.
    The CAAC decided—with the military—what kind of airplanes could and should be built. (In the United States, this “certificating” role lies with the FAA, and the aircraft companies work with their customers, the airlines, to decide what kinds of planes to build.) CAAC and military engineers and designers planned the planes. CAAC inspectors certified the designs as being “airworthy.” Its factories built the planes and set the internal “transfer prices” at which they would be sold—to the flight-operations divisions of the CAAC.
    The CAAC’s flight schools trained the pilots. Its airline division set the routes, sold the tickets, and trained the flight attendants for the trips. Its maintenance people took care of the planes between flights. Its airport operators built and ran the airports. Its fuel division kept the supply tanks full. When there was a crash, as happened very often, its safety division would try to find out what had happened. It ran the airports, it ran the airlines, it ran the regulatory functions. It was like one huge military operation, with the inefficiencies that arise in such a structure.
    Through the beginning of the reform era, the Chinese system had airplanes that were mainly built and designed by the military as knockoffs of Soviet and occasionally Western models; it had a rudimentary system of internal routes; its planes did not undertake long overseas routes, because as the Australian analyst Mark Dougan pointed out 13 in his history of Chinese aviation, the planes couldn’t make overseas trips without refueling, and the very act of stopping at refueling sites would have constituted a humiliating display of how poor the equipmentwas. The heavy industrial base that would be involved in aviation was in the protected hinterland, rather than on the coast, where the big market reforms would start; the whole operation was run by a central ministry, which itself was answerable to the military; and this was part of China’s presentation of itself to the world.
    And the airplanes …

3 * The Men from Boeing
    I first saw airplanes from China’s old fleet in 1986, when my wife and our then young children traveled by CAAC planes from Beijing to Shanghai and Guangdong. We went by CAAC because there was no alternative; foreign carriers didn’t service domestic routes in China, and private Chinese airlines had not been allowed to emerge. What my wife swears she remembers—that we could
see
parts of the ground through holes in the airplane’s fuselage—probably can’t be true, since it would have kept the plane from being pressurized. And yet in those days the airlines might have stayed at low enough altitudes to make a plane with holes technically flyable.
    Tickets were written out by hand, as throngs of passengers crowded around the few airline clerks. Seats were assigned as if you were loading up a packing crate—first every seat in the very last row was filled, then the row in front of that, and then the next one, working forward, so that on any given flight every seat in the last twenty rows in a cabin could be jammed, and the first ten entirely empty.
    The planes were mainly old Soviet junkers, just beginning to be replaced by the