China Airborne

Zusatztext 45752774 Informationen zum Autor James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic . He has reported from around the world and has worked in software design at Microsoft, as the editor of U.S. News & World Report , and as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He is currently a news analyst for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney. Klappentext From one of our most influential journalists, here is a timely, vital, and illuminating account of the next stage of China's modernization-its plan to rival America as the world's leading aerospace power and to bring itself from its low-wage past to a high-tech future.In 2011, China announced its twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of China's project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Completing this remarkable picture, Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi'an, home to 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly-line workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China's pursuit of aeronautical supremacy. He concludes by explaining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and for the rest of the world-and the right ways for us to respond. INTRODUCTION The flight to Zhuhai   In the fall of 2006, not long after I arrived in China, I was the copilot on a small-airplane journey from Changsha, the capital of Hunan province near the center of the country, to Zhuhai, a tropical settlement on the far southern coast just west of Hong Kong.   The plane was a sleek-looking, four-seat, propeller-driven model called the Cirrus SR22, manufactured by a then wildly successful start-up company in Duluth, Minnesota, called Cirrus Design. Through the previous five years, the SR22 had been a worldwide commercial and technological phenomenon, displacing familiar names like Cessna and Piper to become the best-selling small airplane of its type anywhere. Part of its appeal was its built-in “ballistic parachute,” a unique safety device capable of lowering the entire airplane safely to the ground in case of disaster. The first successful “save” by this system in a Cirrus occurred in the fall of 2002, when a pilot took off from a small airport near Dallas in a Cirrus that had just been in for maintenance. A few minutes after takeoff, an aileron flopped loosely from one of the wings; investigators later determined that it had not been correctly reattached after maintenance. This made the plane impossible to control and in other circumstances would probably have led to a fatal crash. Instead the pilot pulled the handle to deploy the parachute, came down near a golf-course fairway, and walked away unharmed. The plane itself was repaired and later flown around the country by Cirrus as a promotional device for its safety systems.   On the tarmac in Changsha, on a Sunday evening as darkness fell, I sat in the Cirrus’s right-hand front seat, traditionally the place for the copilot—or the flight instructor, during training flights. In the left-hand seat, usually the place for the pilot-in-command, sat Peter Claeys, a Belgian citizen and linguistic whiz whose job, from his sales base in Shanghai, was to persuade newly flush Chinese business tycoons that they should spend half a million U.S. dollars or more to buy a Cirrus plane of their own—even though there was as yet virtually no place in China where they would be allowed to fly it. I was there as a friend of Claeys’...

About the author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has reported from around the world and has worked in software design at Microsoft, as the editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He is currently a news analyst for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.

Product details

• Authors: James Fallows
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 26.02.2013
• EAN: 9781400031276
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3127-6
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 220 mm x 15 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage; Vintage; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Business > International economy