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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

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Communicating in China

By James Fallows

Apr 25 2007, 8:30 AM ET

I got on an elevator on the 17th floor of an office building in Shanghai, headed for the lobby. It stopped at the 16th floor, where a conference was apparently just breaking up. Thirteen other people, all Chinese, got in -- as many as the elevator would hold. The door closed, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder-blade -- and ten kept talking on their mobile phones. Floor by floor in the descent, the volume went up, as each person spoke with ever-increasing loudness to compensate for the (ever-increasing) ambient noise.

The good news for China: mobile phones work everywhere --

in elevators, in tunnels, in any room in any building, at every stop on the subway and aboard the MagLev train speeding at 250mph. I can't remember a time, on a trip anywhere around the country, when my phone has been out of range of China Mobile coverage. A recent Amtrak Acela trip from DC to New York, where my phone connections seemed to last a few minutes at best, seems third-world by comparison.

But when I am feeling churlish, that people can use phones everywhere looks like the bad news for China too. I'm in no hurry to bring elevator-borne coverage to the U.S.

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