Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

Great Wall photos

A point comes in every extended travel when the time away and the simple stress of navigating daily tasks pushes a person to exhaustion. It doesn't matter whether the travel is one week, five weeks or five months -- it always happens. Travel is about pacing, and the toughest pace comes not at the very end, but near the end, when most of the journey is complete but the finish line isn't in sight. I've run four marathons, and miles 25 or 26 are never the toughest. It's miles 21, 22, 23 when my legs wobble, my head gets hazy and I wonder how I'm actually going to pull through.

But I do, and people do, and the journey continues, and that's how I found myself on a bus at 8 a.m., heading toward the Great Wall of China. Can't go to China and not see the Great Wall, right? So I scheduled a day trip to mutainyu, the second section of the Great Wall to be restored. 

Pictures from the Great Wall: Mutainyu is also the second-most popular of the Great Wall sites, but it being November, the crowds weren't overwhelming. It's set up like a ski resort, with chair lifts to take you to the sections you want to see and lifts (or a tobaggan if you're feeling adventurous) to take you to the bottom.

The Great Wall, of course, was built to keep the barbarians out, and it was part of an intricate-for-its time defense network. You can still see the guard posts out in the distance, giving advance warning of enemy attack.

Within the wall are parapets for defense and numerous enclosed areas for living quarters and supplies. Cannon are mounted at key locations, the better to keep out Mongol hordes. Now children play on them, tourists take pictures, and guys like me wander up and down the steps, surveying the landscape.

And thinking about lots of things. One curse of writing for a living is the urge to continually turn everything into a narrative. Rather than just live in the moment, I find myself wondering, how can I express this moment in a way that will be illuminating to an audience, instantly turning emotion into product. I had about a half-dozen narrative possibilites in my head as I traversed the wall, but none of them made it here. The moment moved on, the expositions didn't expose much, the jokes didn't have enough punch in the punchlines. Sometimes I get too in my own head when I travel, especially when I'm traveling alone, and it's good not to get too caught up in the self-dramatization, which is tempting in such a dramatic setting.

So all I have to offer is a few sentences and some pictures, a few of the thousands taken in the same spots every day.

I mean, it's the Great Wall of China. What am I going to add to that?

An entrepreneur with Chinese characteristics

SHIJIAZHUANG -- If the local manufacturer here showcased China's aviation heritage, its flight academy showcases its future.

Beijing PanAm International Aviation Academy is the first private, independent professional pilot training academy in China approved by the Civil Aviation Administration of China. It opened for business two years ago, using Western instructors to train Chinese pilots on Diamond trainer jets in the basics of flight, preparing them for certification on China's domestic jetliners.

Jack Li is the academy's chairman. He helped start it after 20 years in Chinese aviation, mainly in air traffic management. He said the academy is a simple response to the supply-and-demand need for Chinese pilots.

"China isn't capitalist or socialist. It's responding to its needs," he said. "The country is trying to grow, and it's trying to remain stable.

"America has more than 200,000 airplanes, and we only have a few thousand," he continued. "The authorities in government are very pleased we are here training pilots. I expect more schools like this one to form."

Right now the academy, which is near Shijiazhuang's airport, is training 156 cadets, all but two sent there by China's airlines. But the school's training is easily transferrable to business jets and general aviation, which Li said he expects to ultimately boost the demand for pilot training even further.

"We do what's best for the airlines, and for the students," he said. "As China grows wealthier, more people will pay for their own training so they can become pilots."

Li said that after two decades connected to the governnment, Western-style entrepreneurship is a challenge -- especially to his generation, which reached adulthood just as Deng Xiaoping allowed China's first market reforms. He said he was uniquely suited to the start up due to his connections with airlines and the government.

"But that's no different than anywhere else in the world," he said. "You have a professional team that manages the business, and you succeed."

My interview with Li was scheduled to last a half-hour, but it ran over, as he sat down for coffee after the academy tour to talk more about his business and life. He's been an aviation enthusiast since he was in college, and he's excited about expanding Pan Am's fleet, maybe adding some Raytheon King Airs to his Diamonds.

And what jet does he want to own?

"I don't want to buy an airplane," he said. "I don't have enough money." Li, who has spent half his life in aviation, doesn't have a pilot's license. "I plan to train for one next spring," he said.

Wise men, watch

If American aviation workers are worried about losing their jobs to China, "that means they have no self-confidence," said Cao Jingnan. "China has its advantages, and America has its advantages."

Jobs, technology, the changes of history -- in a society that respects its elders, Cao Jingnan and Wu Song are wise men. Cao, 67, is a retired engineer with AVIC II. He began his career in Chinese aviation in 1961, and now consults with the government of the People's Republic on general aviation. At 47, Wu is considerably younger. But he holds an esteemed position as the executive vice-president of the Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which advises the PRC on aviation policy.

And their message is simple: invest more in aviation development.

Part of why China's aviation technology lags behind the West's they maintain, is because the government is too reliant on foreign capital, rather than using its own to build its own industry. They contrast aviation with China's space or nuclear-power programs. Because China knows it will never gain foreign funding for those areas due to security concerns, it develops its own resources and moves ahead. Aviation is different -- there, the government is hoping the West will trade technology for lower costs. But it doesn't always work that way.

The conversation was a reminder of how, more than 25 years into modernization and with all the Western companies and free-market practices China is embracing, state policy remains the key determinant of Chinese development. But the roots run deep. China's aviation companies are still ultimately state-run. and almost all innovations are only a generation old -- commercial aviation in any meaningful sense didn't exist until 1978 -- almost halfway through Cao's career.

Cao doesn't miss the old days -- modernization allowed him to leave the government bureaucracy for a less secure, but ultimately more lucrative, future in the semi-private sector. Before Deng Xiaoping and '78, he said, a Shanghai watch cost two to three months' wages. Now it's a fraction of that. For him, someone who found success, he can buy much more than a watch -- a cell phone, a computer, his own apartment, all are possible when they weren't before.

"I thought of buying a car, but I'm getting too old to drive," he said.

Both he and Wu argued that the West needs to be more open to giving China access to technology, which would allow it to do more aircraft tasks. The argument is the mirror of what you'll hear from a Western executive, except the Westerner will use it to justify outsourcing: If you're more open toward (outsourcing/technology acquisition), you'll build cheaper planes, generate more sales, and create more jobs for everyone. The argument can be debated (and is, hotly), but that's the argument.

Wu expressed hope the governments of China and other countries could come to agreements that address both issues.

"China and the U.S. have been allies in the past," Wu said. "Our governments have their differences, but the Chinese people want to be friends."

AVIC II

BEIJING -- A very basic, but very crucial thing to understand about Chinese aviation is that despite all the names and brands, pretty much everything in the country is operated by two companies, China Aviation Industry Corporation I and China Aviation Industry Corporation II, commonly known as AVIC I and AVIC II. The two companies are the spinoffs of the old AVIC, which was split in 1999. AVIC I, broadly speaking, does big aircraft, and AVIC II does small ones, though both have their hands in all other aspects of aviation, aerospace support and other manufacturing operations. They even make some cars.

Big, big companies -- and like most of the country, ultimately rooted in the government, with all its attendant resources and bureaucracy.

Today I met with AVIC II, which leads China's general aviation and smaller-jet development. (They're the ones partnering with Embraer on China's ERJ145 manufacturing in Harbin, for example, and they also make the K8 trainer, pictured right.) The representative said many of the things I've heard elsewhere -- that China lags in some technology, but is catching up. That China seeks management and technology expertise from the West. That China would like to do more co-designing and development of aircraft with foreign partners.

But he also also did not play up China's labor market as much as others did. Labor may be inexpensive, but China will prosper by improving the quality of its products and workforce to the level of international competition, which can mean everything from job creation and foreign partnership to domestic investment and downsizing, he said. That's not only necessary to succeed globally, it's necessary to succeed in China -- WTO regulations require countries to allow foreign companies to compete equally with domestic companies on their own turf, so if China wants to sell planes to its own market, it has to build planes as good as the foreigners' -- including planes built by foreign companies in China.

On China's potential as a market for business jets and general aviation aircraft, he agreed that the potential was large, but that acceptance and sales of such craft will happen gradually, even with the deregulation everyone agrees will be necessary to open the market. Regulation is one factor holding back sales. Culture is another, he said. Right now, many Chinese simply aren't familiar with what a biz jet can do for a company. But a few years ago, many also didn't think automobiles were that useful either -- and look at the streets now, he said.

The fundamental principle is easy to grasp. It's cliche, really. Walk before you can run. Run before you bike. Bike before you drive. Drive before you fly. For a country in the "more cars, fewer bikes" stage, planes would seem to be the next stop on the spectrum. And if all goes according to AVIC II's plans, the company will be well-positioned to fill that need, on its own and with foreign help.

A fool and his money are soon parted

My phone rang about midnight, and I woke up to hear a on the other line, asking in English, "Massage?"

And I thought, how sweet and considerate! Here I am, new to the country, and a complete stranger was kind enough to notice what room I was staying in, find my number, then call me up to offer to help with my aching back. I have many female friends in America, and NOT ONE has ever called me in the middle of the night to offer a massage.

So I, taken aback by her kindness, invited her to my room for tea, and to my surprise ... JUST KIDDING! I slammed the receiver down without saying anything to the xiaojie. And if my phone rings again tonight, the ringer will be silenced.

Let's face it. As an American male traveling alone, I might as well be carrying a flashing sign in Mandarin announcing, "I am a human ATM." People stare at me while I eat. Sometimes they giggle. When I attempt Mandarin, people answer in English. If genetics is destiny, in China it's my destiny to sometimes look like a fool.

But I'm not that much of a fool. I'm not so much of a fool, for example, to think that Tiananmen Square is crawling with art students. That's the scam in Beijing. Here's how it works: An art student approaches a long, gullible-looking weiguoren (that's me) and asks if he wants to see the art exhibition. Should I say yes, I'll end up in a back room with a bunch of kitsch, as large men coerce me into paying hundreds of yuan for the Mandarin equivalent of Velvet Elvis. No thanks. I bet I've been approached ten times by "art students," and every time I shooed them away.

I've been offered more baubles and geegaws on the streets of Chinese cities than Satan offered Jesus after 40 days in the desert. Shiny trinkets. "Antiques." Hashish. DVD? DVD? And girlfriends, girlfriends, girlfriends. Worldly delights at cut-rate prices -- act now! If I look straight ahead with a Great Wall stoneface, I'm quickly left alone. But if I even mistakenly make any gesture that looks like acknowledgement, not only will I be followed, I will be pawed as I walk down the street, sometimes literally shaking people off my back.

Inevitably, people go away -- I'm always walking in very public, very crowded places, and people soon back off to seek easier marks. But hey, it was worth a try, right? And there's another undeniable truth in the pestering: In the global division of haves and have-nots, I'm a have, and they're nots, and that's why they're bugging me. Like most people, I prefer to think I'm prospering because I'm a good person, I'm really bright and talented, I work hard, etc. -- the same thing many people tell themselves to justify buying a bunch of crap they don't need while millions of others struggle and starve. The truth is, I had the dumb luck to be born American, and that's an impressive draw in the historico-geographic lottery.

Everyone on these streets knows that, and a whole bunch of them work full-time bringing economic justice to the world by suckering guys like me. Thus far, this fool and his money have stuck together. I'm sure there are other, more sophisticated scams that might hook me before this trip is out, but I stay vigilant.

My back still hurts. But I think I'll suffer through it on my own.

Overnight train

XI’AN TO BEIJING -– Train Z20 leaves at 19:23 and arrives at 6:58. The best ticket is for a single compartment with four bunk beds stacked two-up and a door that locks from the inside. $50 for the overnight. Smooth ride, decent sleep.

It’s called ruan wo – “soft sleeper” section, compared with “hard sleeper,” which is filled with three-deep plastic seats that can be pulled into makeshift Murphy beds. Everyone else travels in plain ole seats for people who pay less and just make do. The “soft sleeper” section could also be called the “Westerner” section. When I entered the train station – a pressing mass of people more vibrant than any airport I’ve seen in China -– I immediately noticed the contrast between China’s airport culture, which is conducted in Mandarin and English and is filled with Euro-US-Aussie tourists, and the train station, where Westerners were rare and all the signs were solely in Chinese.

Except for the sign that said, “Soft sleeper wait area.” And the sleeper wait area itself, which was filled with foreigners.

But not exclusively.  I’m the only non-Chinese in my Gang of Four sleeper car. I’m in an upper bunk, across from a man traveling alone who was the first to attempt sleep. He was thwarted in that for some time by the couple beneath me. They appear mid-20s and deeply in love – the man in the couple played his beloved a song about an hour ago, a drum-machine-and-nasal-voice pop tune so moving that he sang the chorus to her the second time he played it. And the third time. And when the fourth began, the man upstairs (my fellow traveler, not God), looked down, said something I couldn’t understand, and the stereo turned off. All are now at rest, the girlfriend’s cell phone occasionally beeping with text messages that won’t be acknowledged until morning. A little past midnight, and my laptop’s the only light in the room.

No grand pronouncements on life and travel this evening. Just a long trip to Beijing after mixed results in Xi’an, the site of my best interviews and most frustrating fall-throughs. Two weeks left and much to do. Every day’s a new adventure. You don’t need to travel halfway around the world to figure that out, but it does kind of drive home the point. Train Z20 moves on.

That stuffy feeling

Of all the questions people have asked me about China, the topic that comes up the most is pollution. Are the cities filled with soot? Can a person breathe? Is it sanitary?

Pollution and air quality was my biggest personal concern heading into China, as is evidenced by my luggage, which contains Sudafed, Claritin, antibiotics, anti-bacterial gel and 10 dust masks. I haven't used any of them yet -- but that's because I'm stubborn, not because I've been trouble free. It's been a couple weeks since I've been able to smell anything. After the first few days I've had a continual stuffed nose, along with occasional sneezing binges and sore throats. Nothing debilitating, just an ongoing nuisance.

It's not uncommon to see people going about their everyday lives with facemasks on, like the woman above. It's mainly a virus-protection device -- keep your germs in and other people's germs out. But little reminders of poor air quality abound. The way I've had to reshine my shoes every day in Beijing because simply walking around all day leaves a coat of dust. The evening I was walking back to my hotel a little later than usual and thought I was lost because I didn't see a 30-story building that turned out to be 100 feet away, obscured until then by the haze.

It's not an intolerable environment, but it isn't healthy either. And it's likely to get worse with more industrial development. Probably good for the antihistamine business, but not good for people. I keep toughing it out. One thing I didn't pack was Kleenex. But I'll probably be in America before I've lost that stuffy feeling.

Terra cotta da vida

After aviation, Xi'an's biggest industry is tourism -- that's what it's best-known for worldwide. The locals think of airplanes, and the tourists think of the terra-cotta warriors, the stunning archaeological find that draws millions each year to see the largesse of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, a man so afraid of the afterlife he needed 6,000 stone buddies to help him with the ride.

I am captive to no such fear. This I proved by forsaking the planned 300 yuan ($27) tours that hand-hold Western tourists in favor of  Xi'an city bus 306, the route that stops at terra-cotta town. My pidgin Mandarin helps out -- for example, I understood that after a cab driver next to the bus station offered me "A ride to the terra cotta warriors -- and a girlfriend!" for 50 yuan, that I should say no. Unlike your typical Western hustler, he then said, "pardon me" and pointed the way to the proper bus. I paid my 5 yuan (about 65 cents, one-tenth the cost of a cab ride and a girlfriend in Xi'an), and began the ride.

Bus service remains the most common mode of transport in Chinese cities. They're loud, crowded and go through all sorts of neighborhoods westerners don't go through. Unlike Western buses, a Chinese bus is staffed by three people -- the driver, the ticket-taker, and the conductor. And despite the crowd, people are unfailingly polite. A British journalist I met at the hotel -- the one who told me about 306, which isn't mentioned in the guidebook I brought -- said to expect to constantly be urged to get off at one of several tourist traps before the warrior site.

Nobody hassled me. I've been walking the streets in the same outfit for three days. Perhaps I look poor.

Once you get off the bus you're immediately confronted by hordes of vendors trying to sell terra-cotta knick-knacks for 10 yuan -- okay five yuan -- okay ONE YUAN FOR THIS BEAUTIFUL CARVING of a warrior or a chariot. A whole tent-city industry has sprung up around the site, and it looks like an American flea market would if all the vendors were Chinese. But once you buy your ticket and enter the site, you see a world-class museum and excavation display. This is history at its telling best -- a legacy of a foreign time and the achievement that defines it. Film clip here. Download MVI_0740.AVI

I didn't spend much time at the site. The warriors are astonishing, but it's not like they move around a lot. Once you've seen them, you've seen them. What I did do was take 306 back to the bus station and walk along the city wall, through the city gate and back to the hotel, taking side streets through different neighborhoods along the way. Xi'an is the gateway to the old Silk Road, and one of the last major cities before you reach the rural, ethnically diverse regions of western China.

In the streets just off the town square, which boasts a shopping mall complete with Western luxury goods, a fashion-city pianist playing Gershwin as the new middle class hunts for accessories, stands vast neighborhoods of one-room homes, outdoor stoves and heaping piles of garbage with smells that intermingle with spice. The Muslim influence is palpable, and the city itself is much less developed then Beijing and Shanghai, making class and cultural differences more stark. "More bicycles, fewer cars," you might say. Two blocks from the hotel stands the Great Mosque, where five times a day you can hear calls to prayer emanating from its walls. I was stopped at its entrance, but I stood, and watched, and listened. Two blocks away beckoned the golden arches of McDonald's.

When I was with the Kansans last week, an official from Henan told the group a common Chinese saying that to see China you must visit three places: Beijing, which is China's present. Shanghai, which is China's future, and Xi'an, which is China's past. The past is very much alive in Xi'an, but its present -- shimmering commercial development contrasted with poverty in abundance-- and its future, present in an aviation park on the outside of town, also elbow for attention. All watched over by the terra-cotta warriors, bringing enduring life to an emperor who passed on more than 2,000 years ago, but continues to lead his realm toward the turbulent unknown.

New frontiers

Today the puzzle continued to come together through an interview with Wade Cornelius. He's Boeing's VP in charge of global strategy and the international marketplace. Cornelius comes from the McDonnell Douglas side of the merger, and has expertise going back with China for decades.

I told him about Mr. Jin's comments about China not being up to handling a Boeing final assembly line. He said Mr. Jin was being modest -- China has done final assembly in the past, and it could do it now if it made sense. The real question is, does it?

China right now can do all sorts of important aviation work, Cornelius said, and over the years he's been impressed with their ability to learn and develop. But aviation is highly infrastructure intensive -- you don't just spend a bunch of money and create another Renton, Everett or Wichita overnight. Even if you did, he asked, would it be cost-effective given the efficiency that already exists?

The same principle applies to another issue that gets bandied about -- whether China may someday decide to build its own counterpart to a Boeing or Airbus jet? China is certainly making a foray into regional jets with its new ARJ-21, but once again, does it make sense for China to build another large jet for the world market? If China did make such a jet, how would it sell it in a world competitively divided between the Boeing Union and the United States of Airbus? (My pithy descriptors, not his. But the point was key to the conversation.)

Japan is an example of how development could play out in China. Japan certainly has the quality of workforce to build a large commercial jet if it wanted to, but instead it's building 35 percent of the 787. It's what makes economic sense for Japan. Eventually, China could be a partner of similar significance. In the meantime, it's working its way up to global standards and taking on more international contracting where it can.

Cornelius, like his Airbus counterpart last week, maintained that increased sourcing to China can work out well for workers worldwide -- if increased China sourcing creates value that results in greater Chinese and global sales, making more work for everyone. Coming out of the interviews, it seemed reasonable to me to conclude that China is expected to be a growing player in creating large aircraft, but that U.S. workers (and French and German workers, for that matter) don't need to panic about massive job relocation to China -- not in the next few years at least. The Western edge in infrastructure and expertise is pretty formidable. That said, if Americans found competition with Japan for 787 work not to be much fun, neither will competing with China for projects down the road. The tectonic plates continue to shift. 

An air capital seeks capital

XI'AN -- The city's in the geographic center of China. It's a center of aviation manufacturing, in part due to its central location in the country during the Cold War, and it still does major defense work for its country's civilian and military aviation.

Employment is its big challenge right now. Its central location sometimes makes it tough to attract talent, which tends to gravitate toward the Coast, and its lack of a major waterway makes shipping costs less attractive. If you're a Wichita reader and you find this description familiar, then you'd feel right at home in Xi'an, the city that probably holds best claim to be the Air Capital of China.

I started working on lining up an interview with Mr. Jin Qiansheng, deputy director of the Xi'an Yanliang National Aviation Hi-Tech Industrial Base, last July. If you need to speak with one man about the future of Chinese aviation, Mr. Jin's the guy. He's an aircraft lifer who grew up in Shaanxi province, home to Xi'an, a city of 3 million in a province with an estimated 130,000 aerospace workers (military and civilian). He's helping spearhead the Hi-Tech Base, a government initiative to modernize China's aviation and bring it up to Western standards. It's an ambitious task.

Right now, the base is essentially a big slab of sod with a headquarters building in the middle, a bunch of holes dug at the edges and some farmhouses with expiration dates on them. But the plan for 2010 is for it to be a 5 kilometer square of new buildings -- new plants, new R&D, even a shopping strip and housing for some of the 50,000 workers Jin hopes to draw in from Xi'an and the surrounding area. Development will cost more than a billion dollars US, but the base is seeking foreign investment and could eventually be publicly traded in New York. It's also seeking foreign manufacturing partners. Jin is quite candid about what his company is seeking and what China has to offer.

Xi'an has decades of experience with commercial and military aircraft. But it's not up to Western quality standards, Jin said. Xi'an Aircraft Company, the city's major employer, currently does work for Airbus, Boeing and other companies, but Xi'an isn't anywhere building a large commercial jet for international competition. The Hi-Tech base could do that more quickly in general aviation, he said, and it's seeking out foreign partners to invest in the base and bring work and technology there.

At this point, Xi'an can't offer on-the-edge design or technology, Jin said. What it can offer is a community that has experience building airplanes, connections to what could become the world's second-most important market, and an incredibly cheap labor force. Eventually Xi'an might be interested in creating its own planes for foreign export. It could probably pull that off more quickly with a foreign partner, he said.

So you make the call: You're a Western CEO. You're looking to beat the competition any way you can, and there's a massive new development in China in the works. You expect that the quality won't be up to your standards yet, but it looks like it might be improving soon, and you can't beat the price on labor. If you take a stake in the development, you could make a bigger profit, beat your competition and sell a lot of planes in a promising new place. Or, you could end up with a lot of money sunk in a not-sure thing. Or, you could end up making profits and selling planes, only to find that your assistance hastened the day when your partner could beat you at your own game. (And remember: Doing nothing doesn't mean that won't eventually happen anyway, and if you don't help out, your competition might.)

What would you do?  You have a chance to get in on the ground floor of the Air Capital of China -- but is that where you put your capital? American companies will be asking themselves this question in the next few years, and the answer will help shape the industry for years after that.