James Fallows

Clive Crook has written a wonderful appreciation of Dreaming in Chinese, by Deborah Fallows, who for this and many other reasons I am delighted to say is my wife. The book has received a lot of positive reviews, but I think Clive comes closer than anyone else to capturing its spirit and value. Check it out -- Clive's item, and the book.

I am also grateful to Ian Johnson and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, themselves the authors of a number of very valuable books about China (and, in Johnson's case, on Europe-and-Islam as well), for a year-end wrapup of books about China, at the Asia Society's site. Their discussion of the books they're considering, whose covers are shown in the collage below, makes me want to get and read the two I haven't already seen. And of course I am grateful that they include China Airborne in their list (and for Johnson's previous article about it in the NY Review of Books).

 Thanks to all. 

My wife and I look forward to these next few days in Boston -- the place where she and I met, the place where I spent ages 1 to 2, the place where my sister now lives.

On Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 5, I'll be at MIT's Media Lab from 4:30 to 6 for a presentation called "An American in China." I think that would be me! Details here. Admission free.

On Thursday evening, my wife and I will be at Porter Square Books in Cambridge at 7:00pm. Details here.

This might be the moment to mention that the estimable Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University and the Marginal Revolution blog, has recently said that:

My favorite nonfiction book this year has been James Fallows's "China Airborne." On the surface it's about aviation in China, but it's also one of the best books on China ever, one of the best books on industrial organization in years, and an excellent treatment of economic growth. It's also readable and fun.

 The greatness of Tyler Cowen knows no limits. But you'd probably want to check it out for yourself. See you in Boston/Cambridge.

I get on a plane at Dulles Airport* with the main question concerning David Petraeus being the what/when/where about Benghazi. And I get off in Seattle to find ... good lord!

So let me buy time with a programming note.

1) Yesterday morning, in New York, I had a genuinely wonderful time talking with Bill Moyers on his Moyers & Company show about what our election showed about America, and what China's current transition of leadership said about them (and about us-and-them). The show airs on various stations starting this evening. Here is a preview link; here is a schedule of broadcast times in different cites. Update: Here is the segment online. Thanks to reader MG of Hawaii.

To illustrate why I thought this was particularly interesting: We were talking about whether Barack Obama's re-election, in greatly increasing the probability that Obamacare will go fully into effect, will have a political effect similar to that of Medicare's. By which I mean: Medicare was bitterly controversial before it was enacted; now, it's practically part of the Constitution.

As I was making this point, I realized: sitting three feet away from me is someone who was a key member of Lyndon Johnson's White House during the very effort to get Medicare enacted! So I go to ask him what that was like -- some portion of that discussion was on air, and some afterwards, which I'll describe at some point.

2) I also did an interview this week with Steven Roy Goodman, about the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese education system - and what Americans should and should not learn from it. The YouTube version is here.

3) The transition-of-power underway in China is bringing to the fore many of the tensions and uncertainties in the country that I tried to deal with in my book China Airborne. I have meant for two months to, but am only now getting around to, express my appreciation for the kind of review that writers remember and appreciate, by Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books. It's here. (Oops, I see that it's behind a paywall -- which I didn't know because I am a subscriber. But, hey, subscribe to them too.)

In my heap of posts-almost-ready-for-posting, along with extra installments of Foxconn pics and the readers' defenses of the Atlas Shrugged guy, are more on the strengths and weaknesses of China as I went into them in my book and as we're seeing them now. (Plus the right Chinese title for the book.) They're all on the list.
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* Where I had another of my experiences with TSA pre✓™. I am still so disoriented that I'll have to discuss it later.

Early last year, at the Asian Aerospace show in Hong Kong, I watched eager Chinese purchasers line up for tours of all sorts of aircraft, including business jets large and small. As I describe in my book, I even saw a business-jet purchase completed in cash. It's all part of the gold-rush era for many of China's new rich.

In an alternative universe in which it were possible to fill a book with pictures with no increase in production cost or purchase price, I would have had ones on every page to convey what I had seen and was talking about. For instance, here is a Hawker Beechcraft jet, the 900XP, awaiting a tour by the next group of prospective Chinese purchasers at the Hong Kong show.
 

Just for the record:

- A nice review / podcast / interview by Paul Bertorelli of AVweb.

- A nice item in the New Yorker, albeit behind a paywall.

- A nice review by Benjamin Shobert in Asia Times.

- A nice item by Fareed Zakaria in his GPS blog.

- A nice item in El Mercurio, from Chile, for which I don't have a link but I have a screen shot, below.

Seriously, I am very grateful for the depth of all of these items. When you're cranking out a book like this, you don't dare expect or imagine that anyone will take seriously the case you try to make. I am appreciate the fact that these people did.

This happened just a few hours ago, so the video has not yet gone up on the Aspen Ideas Festival's video archive page. But please look for it tomorrow, and I will put up a link when I get one. It was a debate this afternoon between Minxin Pei, of Claremont McKenna and the influential book China's Trapped Transition (right) and Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist and author of such articles as "Democracy Is Not the Answer" (left, below). Both men are originally from Shanghai but have lived, studied, and worked extensively in the U.S.

The formal topic of discussion was "China and Democracy"; in effect, it was a debate about whether China was nearing the limits of its current authoritarian single-party guided-growth model, or whether it was still gathering steam and had plenty of success still ahead. I am biased, because the subject is of great interest to me and because I was on stage as moderator / referee. But I thought this was an unusually clear, informed, and vigorous airing of contrary views on China's present and future. They pretty much agreed about its past.

Seriously, if you would like the most concise introduction to the case for concern about China's development, you can listen to Minxin Pei's side of the argument in this 80-minute (including audience Q&A) discussion. If you would like an unusually forthright statement of the "China knows best, and don't lecture us when you have such troubles of your own" perspective, listen to Eric Li -- and watch the way they parry each other's arguments. "Debates" at high-toned conferences are often something more like polite seminars. This was an actual contest of views, perfectly civil but with no softening of the hard edges of disagreement. Check it out.

And of course if you'd like a narrative-based approach to these and related questions about China's future...

UPDATE The Atlantic's John Gould has put up a long and very interesting account of the session, which you can read here.

For years I have been a fan of the web site known as The Peking Duck. Therefore I am very gratified by a review that appeared there today, which 100% grasped the point of my recent book.

And from an American traveler now in Beijing:

The current issue that I'm talking to people about is the number of people whose trips back to BJ (from another location in China) have  been foiled by the airline constraints over airspace.  It was actually ridiculous to hear the number of people in this team who take it for granted that their plans (for travel within China) will be foiled by constraints on airspace. 

This morning, at my meeting to discuss energy policy with folks from [XX] office, several of the team members were stuck in one city or  another because of constraints on the country's airspace.  The director of the program was delayed 24 hours getting back to BJ because they couldn't get clearances...  Couldn't help but laugh, and told all of the staff that I had THE perfect book for them to read!

That is all.

Catching up on the book-news home front:

1) I will be on the Kojo Nnamdi show, on NPR from WAMU in Washington, today at 1pm EDT. Details here. Colbert ahead next month, details soon.

2) A brief book excerpt in Wired, here, with a very nice illustration.

3) A nice piece by Greg Waldron in Flight Global ("must read" in the headline, "fun to read" in the text, etc).

4) An exploration by Alex Usher, on an American higher-ed site, of the "soft-power" angle in the book as it involves universities in China and the U.S.

5) Another round of Q-and-A about America, Australia, and their respective abilities to think clearly about China, with Sam Roggeveen on The Interpreter site of the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

6) In a different kind of book news, I had a big review of David Maraniss's huge new Obama biography in the New York Times this weekend, fyi. The book is worth reading -- but don't take my word for it, read the review!

I will update the tour and appearance dates on my book page ... soon! 

And oh yes! Several of the electronic "writing tools" I used in this book and all other work in the past few years are going on a limited-time, package-deal "Writer's Festival" sale. I don't use one of the four programs in the package, Bookends, but the other three -- Scrivener, Tinderbox, and TextExpander -- are very valuable to me. The irreplaceable Scrivener, originally Mac-only, now has a PC version; the rest are for Mac. If you search for Scrivener or Tinderbox here on the Atlantic site, you'll see a variety of past testimonials.

While traveling I am reminded of that modern truth: we are omni-connected in a bad way (crowds staring at devices in their hands when walking, driving, talking -- people will start making fun of this pretty soon) without being reliably connected in a good way (being able to count on usable connections on a laptop when moving from place to place*). Thus today's catch-up grab-bag:

1) Iran The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg reminds us in this authoritative and news-filled interview/post about the fundamental problem with all "let's bomb Iran" scenarios: they would make the situation much worse rather than in any way "better." This is an evergreen theme for our magazine. In his latest report, Jeff Goldberg reports on a lengthy discussion in Israel last month with Meir Dagan, former head of Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad. A sample, with my emphasis added:

What angers [Dagan] most is what he sees as a total lack of understanding on the part of the men who lead the Israeli government about what may come the day after an Israeli strike. Some senior Israeli officials have argued to me that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities might actually trigger the eventual downfall of the regime. Dagan predicts the opposite: "Judging by the war Iran fought against Iraq, even people who supported the Shah, even the Communists, joined hands with (Ayatollah) Khomeini to fight Saddam," he said, adding, "In case of an attack, political pressure on the regime will disappear. If Israel will attack, there is no doubt in my mind that this will also provide them with the justification to go ahead and move quickly to nuclear weapons." He also predicted that the sanctions program engineered principally by President Obama may collapse as a result of an Israeli strike, which would make it easier for Iran to obtain the material necessary for it to cross the nuclear threshold. 

This report, and a similar cautionary interview by Jeff Goldberg last week, for me are the conclusive response to yet another recent item from The Goldberg Oeuvre. That was his asking whether Barack Obama, with his track record of taking big, dramatic risks despite his super-deliberate reputation, might be expected to make a similar, "What the hell, let's try it" choice about Iran.

My answer is: No. He is not going to do this. Nothing in Obama's record reveals a willingness to make a choice with as much unbounded negative potential as this one. Running for President as a freshman senator? At worst he'd suffer a bad early loss -- as many ultimately successful candidates have done. Ordering the strike on bin Laden? Riskier, for his reputation and for relations with Pakistan -- but not in the sense of opening up a whole new military front. The commitment in Libya: hedged and contained from the start. Similarly with Iraq and Afghanistan. I won't go down the entire list but will say, Nothing in Obama's career illustrates a recklessness like what would be involved in  bombing Iran. (Readers from the Netanyahu government, please ignore this paragraph. I'm bluffing.)

2) China Two days ago, the Atlantic's editor James Bennet and I had a discussion at Atlantic HQ, hosted by David Bradley and organized by Steve Clemons, about China, China Airborne, and when my next article for the Atlantic was going to be turned in. The video is here.  This morning I talked Charlie Rose and Erica Hill, on CBS, about the same topics -- at least the first two. That video is here.

3) Recession In addition to Derek Thompson's very good piece on our site about what makes job loss in this recession so unusual, please see the "America's Hidden Austerity Program" by Ben Polak and Peter Schott of Yale. It has been widely cited but is too important not to mention again. Short answer: in all other recessions, public employment has helped pull us back up. This time it is pulling us down. 

4) Australia Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute in Sydney, has been doing an online Q-and-A with me about China, America, technology, and related topics. I think U.S. readers in particular would find this enlightening, for the difference in assumptions about and perspectives on China, as seen from the Antipodes. It's on Lowy's The Interpreter site: part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is in process.

5) TSA I have news, but it will wait. That is it for now.

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* On this point: I love Amtrak and take it whenever I can. But, really, Amtrak needs to stop advertising its east coast trains as having WiFi -- because they don't in any kind of reliable way.

Suppose Amtrak under-promised and said: You get to travel from downtown to downtown, with no TSA screening lines and in relative calm, plus with power outlets at each seat ... and from time to time along the route free WiFi service might be available! Then people would be happily surprised when it did work. Instead its promising sometime that its current technology just can't deliver, therefore creating needless Louis CK-style irritation when it doesn't work rather than appropriate gratitude when it does.

As a reminder: my contention is that China's ambitions, progress, and frustrations in this field are proxies for its potential more generally. Thus I notice:

1) Ambitions, from Business Insider.



2) Scale: To the same effect, from AFP:



3) But wait, not so fast (from Reuters):




4) And, even more fundamentally:


My Q&A with the WSJ giving The Big Picture -- and also a (to me) very interesting analysis at the Lone Operator site of the creativity, and self-limitations, of China's current aerospace ambitions as a guide to the country's potential overall.

And while I'm at it, a sadder-and-wiser tale at Bloomberg Business Week about an ambitious young American trying to seize some of the opportunities that seem so "easily" available in China. This fits into a grand tradition, stretching back to Mr. China, and To Change China, and Matteo Ricci, and beyond.

I've mentioned many times, most recently here, how valuable photographs are in conveying the unbelievable variations in wealth, modernization, landscape, and other aspects of modern China. The point may seem banal, but I think it matters more for China than most other places because the outside-world's view is so skewed toward images of skyscrapers in Shanghai and Beijing.

I have only one regret about my current book -- which is not many, as book-regrets go. For reasons of production time and (mainly) cost, it wasn't possible to include any of the hundreds of pictures I had taken of people, places, real-estate projects, and practical and fanciful undertakings that I was describing. [Update: Andrew Galbraith of the WSJ in China has a Q-and-A feature about the book today on the Journal's China Real Time site.]

So I plan to start including a few here. I will begin with photos taken by one of the leading characters in the book, Peter Claeys, who is originally from Belgium but has spent much of his life in Asia and, when I met him, was trying to sell stylish Cirrus SR22 airplanes to the newly affluent Chinese business class. Eventually, as I describe, the Cirrus company itself, of Duluth, Minnesota, was sold to the Chinese government. But that's a different story.

Here are a few of his pictures that resonate with things I saw and described. First, at right, a pilot named Chen Yan -- a combination Amelia Earhart / Kim Kardashian aviator / model / celebrity fashion-icon in China, who is a character in my book. Here she is in the cockpit of the plane that Peter Claeys and I flew to the Zhuhai Air Show, the morning after the hair-raising flight I described here.

Now, in front of the same plane, Chen Yan, Peter Claeys, and a friend. (More about Chen Yan is here.)

In-house news: I mentioned yesterday that I had enjoyed talking with Charlie Rose earlier this week, despite the intimidating effects of having the taping just before and just after his sessions with actual movie stars. (Including the Prometheus ones...! ) The resulting show, which ran last night, is here, for the record.

Also, for the record, I'm grateful for a nice review by Greg Waldron on the Flight Global site. That is all.

Yesterday I was in New York taping an interview about China, Chinese technology, Chinese ambitions, and so on for the Charlie Rose show. It is scheduled to be run tonight.

Other news coming up shortly, but I mention this just for the record and because it was a lot of fun. It was also fun being able briefly to consort with the actual movie stars being interviewed before and after me, but as a sober journalist I am not supposed to admit that. One of them was himself a pilot, so I had some assumed topic of shared interests beyond "Oh I'm a big fan."

For the record:

1) A very nice article on China's aerospace ambitions, by Kelly Chung Dawson, in China Daily. Of course I am particularly grateful for this one.

2) Also grateful for Eric Liu's article, in Time, about the real dynamics of US-China competition.

3) And to Brendan Koerner for his item in the Zocalo's  Summer Beach Bag reading list.

4) And to Margaret Slattery for her roundup of a Foreign Policy summer reading list.

Seriously, thanks to all for their gracious attention. Hey, read up!

(Pretty soon, on my book website, I'll do a compendium of video clips and reviews, fyi.)

I will graft these onto my Official 'China Airborne' Info Page shortly, but at the moment and for the record:

1) A discussion on Morning Joe this morning, in which I was talking about what there is to worry about, and not, in the panoply of current Chinese high-tech ambitions. Plus, what the example of Colin Powell shows about the People's Liberation Army:
 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

2) A similar discussion with Daniel Gross on Yahoo Finance this afternoon. More emphasis on economic and technical ramifications. 



3) I love how Knute Berger, of the estimable Crosscut in Seattle, has applied the "Happy with crappy" aspects of China's hyper-rapid development drive to its future prospects -- and those in America too. I first wrote about the "Happy with crappy" philosophy -- that is, not messing around with the fine points but just moving ahead as fast as you can -- back in 2007 in a long article about Chinese factories. The phrase came from Andy Switky of IDEO, who spent much of his time in China trying to find the sweet spot between speed and quality.

4) If you are in Louisville this evening, I'll hope to see you at the Free Public Library. Then, Shanghai. Back to non-promo discussions shortly.

My tech colleagues at the Atlantic have graciously set up a special standalone page for book-related info. (Thank you: Betsy, Clarissa, Sarah, Jennie.) As of tomorrow, I will have wrangled it sufficiently to move all further such info there.

For the moment, one last book installment:

1) Monday night DC: Politics & Prose. If you are in DC on May 21, I will be at this renowned bookstore at 7pm. Last night, I saw my friend Tim Noah discuss his excellent book, The Great Divergence, there.

2) Tuesday night NYC: If you are in New York on May 22, I'll be there in the evening, with my friend and mentor Orville Schell.

3) Last night, All Things Considered. I did an interview with Guy Raz about China's overall technological ambitions, as reflected by its aerospace drive.

4) Last week, Marginal Revolution. The economist (and Atlantic author!) Tyler Cowen had a very generous note about the book on his site. I am mainly delighted that he saw the central point.

After that, headed to Louisville -- and Shanghai! But more about that tomorrow, on the new page.

As promised, will move these to a standalone site when we eventually get one up and running, but until that occurs:

1) Silicon Valley Thanks to Jonathan Weber, long ago my boss at the Industry Standard and now west coast bureau chief for Reuters, for moderating an interesting session last night at the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto. I believe a video of the speech and Q & A will be available online at some point.

2) Seattle Tonight I will be in yet another of my beloved former home cities, Seattle, in a session with Eric Liu at Town Hall. Hope to see you there.

3) Phoenix Tomorrow night, at another Zócalo event (after a very enjoyable one in Santa Monica on Monday) I will be at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

4) Asia Sentinel A very thorough review yesterday in Asia Sentinel by John Berthelsen*, who has covered similar techo-nationalism developments in Asia over the decades for the Wall Street Journal and other publications. I'm grateful for the seriousness with which he takes the argument.
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* The Berthelsen and Fallows families share a strange small-world connection. In the fall of 1986, my wife and I had just arrived with our two young sons in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, with plans of spending the next two years based there while I traveled around the region doing reports for the Atlantic.

We had been staying for several weeks in the classic/seedy colonial hotel, the Merlin, while trying to find a permanent place to live. Eventually a wonderful possibility emerged: an old-style colonial rubber-planter's bungalow, complete with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roof, with mango and papaya trees is the spacious yard, and with windows that were open to the elements, so that birds flew right through during the daytime. It was on Lorong Kuda -- "Horse Lane" -- and was right on the edge of the colonial-relic turf horse-racing course then in the middle of town, so that on race days our sons and their friends could watch from a few yards' distance as a clot of racing horses thundered by. We loved that house and every minute of the years we spent there.

Why was it available? It was about to be rented - but the prospective tenants, one John Berthelsen and his wife, had not been able to begin their occupancy. The Malaysian government had just ordered Berthelsen expelled, out of pique at the forthright coverage that he and his fellow Wall Street Journal correspondent, Raphael "Rocky" Pura, had been doing on Malaysian politics. (In those days, the WSJ and International Herald Tribune would often not be delivered at all to newsstands and subscribers, or would show up with pages ripped out, if they displeased the government censors.) The Berthelsens' departure was a loss for them and their readers, but for my family there was a silver lining in strictly real-estate terms. We tried to enjoy the house vicariously on their account.

More about this house and its stormy history another time.