Read China Airborne for Free Online

out to be the wealthiest person present; as the CEO of one of the largest battery-making companies in the world, he was there to talk not about coal but about electric cars. A few weeks earlier he had been to Washington, where he met congressmen and told them about his dream of opening factories in the United States to produce batteries for a new electric car he was helping design. “This can change the future! If I can reassure those congressmen,” he said, according to an interpreter at the table.
    Confident, can’t-wait talking and planning of this sort is familiar as both an exhausting and an exhilarating trait of modern China. I would hear the phrase “my dream is …” moreoften in the course of a typical month in China than in a typical decade in the United States. The person who appeared to be most excited by his dream that evening was the dinner’s host, a stocky man in his late fifties named Xu Changdong. Mr. Xu had a stake in the coal and energy discussion, to put it mildly; he personally controlled development rights to vast coal reserves in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which the regional government had awarded him in exchange for his plans to open an advanced manufacturing plant there. But what really excited his passion was his newest venture, which he was sure was going to transform the country: a boom in aviation.
    The morning after this dinner, one of his companies would announce a plan to sell helicopters inside China and start building them there—including at the plant in Inner Mongolia. Also that next day, the main Chinese newspapers would splash on their front pages the story of China’s across-the-board push to become a major aerospace and air-travel power as part of the upcoming Twelfth Five-Year Plan. 2 In American and European discussion, the very term “Five-Year Plan” smacks of the Soviet era, suggesting clumsy central-government efforts that are out of touch with market realities and are therefore doomed before they start. Within China, businesspeople, government officials, and members of the public take very seriously the goals and spending targets laid out in the successive Five-Year Plans. They know that this is where a lot of public money and attention will be directed. The Twelfth Plan, counting from the First in the early 1950s under Chairman Mao, would run from mid-2011 through 2016 and include a big boost for aviation, which it listed as one of the “seven major strategic industries” for the next phase of the country’s growth. Public investment in all phases of China’s aerospace future over those years would come to 1.5 trillion Chinese yuan renminbi (RMB), or about$230 billion. That was a 50 percent increase over comparable investment in the previous Five-Year Plan—and, depending on how you count, somewhere between five and ten times as much as the Federal Aviation Administration’s budget for capital improvements and airport construction in the same period in the United States. Dozens of brand-new airports were coming, and thousands of new airliners for China’s fleets, and many thousands of helicopters, business jets, and small aircraft of all varieties.
    “You can’t imagine how big this is going to be,” Xu Changdong said in English to the guests at the dinner. “People have the money. They have the technology. The airspace is opening.”
    You can’t imagine
. By this time in China, I was beginning to.
    Xu had grown up in Shanghai, gone to New York as a penniless thirty-year-old graduate student in 1983, and stayed there for nearly twenty years as he built an import-export empire. During the 1990s, after he had established himself, he went out one summer day on an open-ocean fishing expedition off Long Island. Anglers had ringed the boat’s railings, with their backs to one another as they cast lines into the sea. Suddenly a hook that one person had flipped over his shoulder, on the backswing of a cast, caught the eyeball of someone on