China Airborne by James Fallows Page B

first Boeings that the opening to the United States had made available. Through the 1970s, not long after delivery of the Boeing 707s whose sale was agreed during Richard Nixon’s visit to China, the Shanghai Aircraft Research Institute developed the Y-10. This was a four-engine jetliner that closely resembled the 707 and was powered by Pratt & Whitney engines that China had bought as part of the 707 deal. Theplane’s first flight, in 1980, was a point of national pride, but it proved to be inefficient and the project was scrapped after only three aircraft were built. In the mid-1980s, by the time of our visit, the CAAC fleet also included a few Tridents from Hawker Siddley in Britain, but we only ever flew in the old Ilyushin and Tupolev models from the Soviet days. The seats lacked seat belts—or, if the belts had once been there, they had long since disappeared from the planes we took, on internal flights from Beijing to Shanghai, and later Shanghai to Guangzhou. As we walked past the First Class section on one of the flights to our seats in the very back, we saw that the luxury seats were the squat, thickly cushioned armchairs familiar from any formal Chinese meeting room, seemingly just hauled into the airplane and bolted onto the floor. Passengers moved around at all stages of flight, from takeoff to landing, as if they were on a bus or a train. Flight attendants passed sugar-wafer cookies to the passengers during the flight. The safety record in those years was terrible, as we would have guessed from looking at the equipment. But news of crashes was hushed up, so we didn’t know enough to worry.
    However challenging air travelers of the mid-1980s, like us, found the Chinese aviation system, it was nothing compared with what the first international representatives of modern aerospace had found only a few years earlier. The best known of them is E. E. Bauer, who came to Beijing in 1980 as Boeing’s first official representative in China. “We had expected cold weather in Beijing, but were unprepared for the sub-freezing temperature inside the terminal,” he wrote in his memoir,
China Takes Off
. 1 I often had the book with me when traveling in China and would thumb through it as a token of how much the circumstances truly had changed. And also as a reminder of how often China’s technological growth and success have confoundedthose who assumed that practical and cultural obstacles were too great to overcome. Even Bauer felt this way early in his stay, when he contemplated the way air travel operated in the CAAC era: “As I sat in the barnlike room facing a long counter with small, teller-windowed openings in the solid plywood wall that extended to the ceiling, one for each city destination, watching the customers massed in tight groups, jockeying for positions in front of the windows, everyone shouting and gesticulating, I feared with certainty that the Chinese would never break out of the cocoon that has inexorably bound them for so many centuries.” 2
    I emphasize Bauer not just for his observations but because of the central and, relative to its reality, underpublicized role that Boeing has played as a third party to interactions between the U.S. and Chinese governments. E. E. Bauer exemplified an early part of that interaction; his successors illustrate it now.
E. E. Bauer and the early days
    Bauer was a veteran Boeing engineer and manager with little experience outside the United States. He got to Beijing soon after Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 state visit to Jimmy Carter at the White House had cemented China’s new opening to the West. At the time, six different U.S. airlines had, each on its own, a fleet larger than the entire Chinese inventory of passenger airliners. The CAAC was about to receive its first three Boeing 747s. This purchase—like all major airline sales in the modern age—was as much a diplomatic gesture as a commercial transaction, constituting a big and noticeable U.S. export to China.