China Airborne

From one of our most influential journalists, here is a timely, vital, and illuminating account of the next stage of Chinas modernizationits plan to rival America as the worlds 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 Chinas project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nations hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of Americas transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century.

Completing this remarkable picture, Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xian, 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 Chinas 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 worldand the right ways for us to respond.