the vast growing part of the world. what i'm going to do, the plan for the next 28 minutes or so in which i'm going to be talking before the questions and conversation, i have three main things i'm going to do. first, i'm going to describe why it was that i thought the most effective way i could tell the stories about china that i think are interesting is through this medium of looking at one aspect of its high-tech ambitions. i have -- i found myself unexpectedly getting into worlds i had not been looking for when we first got there, and i thought this was a way it had surprising benefits in explaning what china is doing. there is a fact about writing books, and how many people here, by chance, have written books? some, you know, a significant number. how many intend to? a larger number. there is one main bit of advice i can give you about writing books is that you should only do a certain book if you feel you simply have to do it because otherwise the process is so discouraging, to soul eroding, so corrosive of all the good things of life that you find other things to do along the way. you think why is it i'm spending eight hours a day or more sitting in what one of my friends called the lonely agony of the writer's den. the answer to the question is that you don't simply feel better having done it than not doing it, but there's something you feel as if you could explain things to a readership and yourself, you'd be satisfied. i felt there was a part of reality that nobody else captured, and i had a chance to chronicle it. part one is the approach that led to this book with, as you'll see, the delightful propaganda poster cover with having the rev niewtion lal culture people looking at the sky. it's a different china now than the time of the poster, but something about the spirit of the image is what i was trying to portray. the second thing then is talk about some of the larger currents underway in china, affecting its development, affecting the rest of us, that come together in this con kl i'm telling in the -- chronicle i'm telling in the book. ones are positive, others are mixed in their implications, and others are bad, but why they are significant or the larger themes in modern china it's trying to resolve, and then, finally, i'll talk about the big contemporary questions for china, per se, some of the recent items that's been in the news, the trend of u.s.-chinese relations, and what we can expect for those after this presidential election and the change of power in china so that is the plan. first about the background of this book. second about the themes of china that i found myself discoverying over the last six years in laying out, and third, about china in the larger sense, how to think about how she's changing and what we don't know. the don't know an important part to make mental room for. that's the agenda. the reason i ended up writing this book is that when my wife and i first arrived in shanghai about six years ago, beginning a three-plus year on-scene stint and several return visits, and we're returning again in 10 days, is i found myself looking through magazine articles and other sorts of reports on radio and other ways trying to convey things which were most different about being there on scene compared with what i had read about china over the years. the main advantage, the main philosophy of a magazine like the atlantic is to have our reporters go around the world and tell you things that are different if you're there from what you think just reading about it from a distance. i recognize there is a closed loop paradox to this because we also are writing things for people to read at a distance, but still, that's the arbitrage we apply, what do you realize by being there? some of the features i wanted to convey about china's scale and diversity, one was simply the energy of things, that every day you go on a car ride, you drive, ride a bike, take a bus ride, go on an airplane trip, and you see something you had not imagined the morning before, almost ever evening around the dinner table around china, we say you won't believe x, that i saw today. the "you won't believe" part was at every day, and the x value was different every day. i wanted to convey generally a sense of two paradoxes about china for american readers in particular which was how they could feel responsible for taking china seriously and paying attention to what is going on there for good and bad without being afraid of it, without thinking it was necessarily world mastering and all conquering. it's truly absorbing and worth paying attention to even if you don't think it's the master of america's economic fate or opposing its new ideological order on the world. i also wanted to von cay to american readers that the fact that contradictory things of every sort are true simultaneously in some part of china, the way in which somebody asks you is it controlled? you say yes. is it uncontrolled? yes. is it good? yes. is it bad? yes. is it modern? you know the sequence i'm going down and finding ways to allow mental room for the range that is such a vivid factor of modern china was also one of my ambitions. one antidote i was trying to get across. we were in beijing to the runup of the olympics and the way after that. we saw the ways in which the country was optimistic and fearful about showing itself off to the outside world. for example, in the two months before the olympic games, the chinese foreign ministry authorized a series of protest zones around beijing where people could come and air grievances, and the world's press see, oh, yes, china is toller rent in this way. they do this. simultaneously, the chinese security authorities are denying all requests for authorized protests and arresting people who apply. both those things are true. people trying to open up, trying to close down, and so the challenge is how to capture that. i ended up thinking that for people in the communications business, it was important to have a simultaneously multitrack policy on trying to convey this reality. one track is the view from above, the macro big picture where with you say, here's an article or a book or a tv series about pollution in china or about china's financial might around the world or about the future of chinese industry or women in china or whatever. that's important. i've done some of those. you read those. the other thing, which is valuable in my experience, is the microview because there's so many particular stories, people, provinces, successes, still years in china that tell the world about what is going on there. they also can be very valuable. for example, a family plug here, my wife, a linguistics person did a wonderful book last year called "dreaming in chinese," and her write modern china tiff on what -- motiff on what to say, and whether you immerse yourself in china, and there's a book called "foreign babes in beijing," a young american who became a soap opera villainist/slut on a popular chinese television drama, and what she learned, and our library is partly beijing and precise picture, and i thought as the months went by, i had a very vivid microcosm tale to relate. these are people who nobody else in the outside, in the western press, had ever met or written about, and cumulatively, their stories real did tell you something about where their entire country was going. i'll give you a couple of illustrations of the characters i found myself meeting month after month after month that populate the book and the land scape they seem to -- they inhabit of what is going on in the country. for example, one of the characters earlier in my book as a man whose family name is xu,-x xu,-x-u. he was looking for opportunities in the early 90s when he was in his 20s then. he got to new york, he had some kind of a student role there. he was appalled on landing at kennedy airport in new york for recognizing the taxi fare exhausted all the cash he had in the entire assets. he got a job that night, a second job that morning, studied, over over 20 years, he became very, very rich, and he decided five years ago to return to china, where he now, in addition to being a coal barren runs the western return to scholars association. actually, i'm going to see him again next week in shanghai, but the reason i sphwro deuce him is that a vivid, vivid memory for him of time in america was when he was on a fishing trip, a commercial day fishing boat in long island sound, and people were casting lines into the water of long island sound, and on a back cast, somebody leaned back and a giant three pronged hook got into somebody else's eye on the boat. this was panic and dispair and moaning and everything else, but mr. xu noticed the captain came to them and said, do not panic, do not be afraid. we know in less than eight minutes the coast guard helicopter will be here, and he'll be taken to safety. he watched the time piece, 7 minutes the helicopter arrives, lift the man out, and not only was the eye saved, but he's in entirely good health. mr. xu thought to myself, in my country, this man would have died. as he immassed a a fortune preparing to go to china, he wanted to bring rescue helicopters to china and if people are injured in crashes or eyes gouged, there's a way to be saved. you find across the territory of china, people with these half lunatic, but half ambitious and serious dreams that they are applying in in arenas beyond aerospace and aviation. mr. xu is also in addition to the world western return scholars' association, he has a helicopter company. he's selling them to the police, businessmen, and all the rest. i met a man in a city we know for the warriors, but also they are famous for a site of aerospace industry. the reason why there's a quarter million aerospace employees here is something obvious only in the context of chinese strategic history. chairman mao put it there because in the 1950 #s he decided this is the point in the chinese land mass that's furthest from the closest foreign board rer, and therefore, it's the hardest to bomb by the russians, american, japanese, and everybody else. you have, in the middle of the country, a quarter million person encampment of aerospace technology making parts for boeing, air bus, and others, but the man who is in charge of all of this took me in his office a couple years ago, and he showed me two schiews by his -- statues by his desk that he draws inspiration from every day. one is the one who liberalized the chinese economy over 30 years. if not for mr. dung, i'd be imposerred in a rice patty. the other was of george washington. he said, well, washington could have been king, and he decided not to. this is an example to china, and more people should take this seriously. i met a man who grew up in rural, in the midwest of the united states, and he worked for boeing as a safety inspector around the world. he was a european specialist, and he was on assignment about 25 years ago when they said how would you like to go to china? he said, realm, not very much. he didn't speak chinese, he was middle-aged, ect., but if you want to be protected against layoffs, in the part of the world where the work flow is likely to be strongest is in china. he decided to go to china, he became a boeing representative, and an faa representative in china. now he spends most time in a chinese office building speaking in chinese with people he is trying to train to have air traffic systems that are safer than the ones in the past in china that bring -- he's been part of the movement, it's been entirely unpublicized of mainly american and also international figures who, over the last 15 years embedded themselves in the chinese infrastructure, saying if you want to bring this to international standards, here's the way to do it. there's a whole list of other people. i'll just give two other brief mentions of the characters that i was describing. .. at this time they didn't really know what they were going to do with them they thought it would be worth having their own neighborhood airport, and i saw one of these transactions conducted in cash with a great big locker full of money. the locker full of money would suggest narco-trafficking or whatever else else and they know there are corrupt aspects to the chinese boom also but they stayed in the scale and the excitement and all the rest. i open the book with a description of one other person who has decided from an outsider, to make his way in this wild west frontier, a man named peter kleist who is a linguistic, one of many linguistic wizards i sigh in china, and his role was to sell a kind of airplane called cirrus. if any of you are pilots, you will know about this. is the most popular small airplane in the world and starting in 2000 i bought one myself and flew a round a plane with four seats, single engine and a parachute for the entire plane. if things go wrong you pull a red handle in the parachute comes down at munich people have been saved. peter was selling to these in china who could not use them at the sign including a businessman who wanted to park it in the lobby of his business so that his mistress and girlfriend and business competitors could sit in it and be impressed with this magnificent. i took a flight with peter and it was a sign of both the ambitions of things happening in china and some of the limitations of the level they are now at. my point, just to bring this first part to a close is in our lives of traveling around china, my wife and i had quite a different impression in japan during its boom time in the 1980s. in japan you mainly marveled at the system, the organization of the corporations in the schools and the training and the way that individuals were part of a larger system. in china from my perspective you mainly marveled at the individuals and the friction, the sort of centrifugal forces around the country that people with big dreams trying to create arrow topi is so seeing these people i thought there is itself -- tale to tell. now let me go to the second part of what i'm going to discuss initially which is some of the larger tensions and developments within china that you see in the microcosm in this aspect of their high-tech ambition and the plot lines you follow. you can see in almost any other part of what is ambitious and what is frustrated and what is promising and what is not developing in china. one of them of course is the nature of a the all-out push for modernization in china. people often say, how can the chinese public put up with some of the constraints and limitations and oppressions of life in china in the these days and they think the main answer is over the past 30 years, as people look back, five years in the past in 10 years in the past they recognize that their life is much better. family life is better than they were before and this is thanks to this all-out push the government has been directing and individual entrepreneurs have been the main engine for. the part of the push underway right now is the famous 12, five year plan. how many of you have studied the 12, five year plan? in the united states in the u.s. context the entire idea of the five-year plan sounds preposterous. this one in particular because of the change in the curve is proposing for the chinese economy. it says basically looking backwards, china's successes have almost all been in the low-tech, low-wage factories, building roads and building railroads and all the rest. in the future under this plan they want to have more high-tech. they wanted infotech industry and they want a biotech industry and the clean tech industry and an aerospace industry so the idea the country can move from its current level of technology to the next is something that is being played out in this industry and a lot of others. another major theme that you see about china in this field and others is the style in what i think of as the real estate centric theory of modernization. if you look for an explanation of almost anything happening in china now and say why is the seaport going there and why is this ancient village being removed and y. is x, y or z happening, the real estate deals may not be the only answer but they are usually the first answer and it is the case certainly in the huge boom in aerospace construction underway in china. i don't know if anyone here knows the actual number of airports being built in the united states now. i have heard two, i've heard one, i've heard zero and i have heard for but it's a small number. in china there are 100 airports under construction. they have many fewer than the u.s. to begin with but this is a sign of building up infrastructure with the idea that things will follow and all these intermediate people who are making money as this goes on. land for the airport, tractors, and that gavlick -- navigation equipment. so this is, you see in this deal anything you have read about go cities in china or the land boom, the land bubble, that same plot in that same pressure is underway in the aerospace ambition. you see in this field something that i came to the u.s. very important to making sense of china which is the way that everything is simultaneously true. i mentioned before in a way that contradictions exist but when he think of economic emphases, people abass made well what is the balance between high-speed rail and aviation and what is the balance between water traffic and lan traffic? the answer is more of all of them. there's this pressure that china is building more high-speed rail and airports. there is something i will allude to as a major.. it's a large theme in my book which is, the existence of a semisoft power in u.s.-china relations is hardly ever discussed and that is not the sovereign nation of the united states or the sovereign nation of the people's republic of china but rather the on the knowledge sovereign of the boeing corporation. many of the crucial turning points in china's decisions about what to do have been usually an official -- unofficial way by boeing. here is one illustration. about 15 years ago, and i described as a major chinese airline got its first contract to have regular flights to california. they were very excited about this and there's a huge opening and a great mark of prestige. when the first plane landed at lax it was suddenly surrounded a safety inspectors from the faa who impounded it and said no, no, no, you're not going to land here with this kind of the maintenance record any more. the airline was aghast and shock. they got in touch with boeing and said how can we keep buying your products if we can't fly to the united states? boeing then very subtly and effectively midwifed an arrangement between the u.s. faa between flight schools in the united states, people who would do training and their chinese counterparts and said here is the way you run safety systems. you don't have czech pilots doing inspections for their brother-in-law or their next-door neighbor. and so even today, many things that matter in chinese aviation cars being sort of a tripartite tripartite -- tripartite negotiation of china the united states and boeing are the ones working these things out. one other, just to mention one or two other points that have come together in this narrative. any of you who have been in china know first-hand what the rest of you know theoretically that environmental challenges are in my mind the worst problem for china and the worst challenge the nation faces in its drive to modernize. this of course affects aviation because while flights are in some ways resourced savings, it's more efficient to have flights to remote western china than to build railroads there. of course emissions from aviation are an important climate issue because they fly at such high altitude. there is a balance in china between how terrible things are and how hard the government and private industries are trying to improve them. in aviation and the shows up both in good ways, for example the huge research project run by boeing and the chin tao university on fuel and also in a very unexpected way where one of the most important environmental terriers to a better environmental management in china turns out to be the chinese military. almost all the airspace in china's controlled by the military and airlines have to take indirect contorted routes through this. many of you know that airliners in the u.s., if you listen to the pilot flying it 35,000 feet, often in their chinese flight will be flying at 10,000 feet which is a much less efficient way for the airlines to operate. many people have argued to me that chinese airlines could double their traffic with no increase in emissions if simply they got rid of all the military control of the airspace by flying the same efficient routing so there is the environmental issue in the military issue and there is one other point that i will mention here which is the surprising parallel between the openness and the closeness of chinese life to outsiders. something i liked very much about living in china was the way it seemed permeable and accessible. there was always a way to do something if you had a friend, if you applied some surprising approach, you could find wasted youth most things even as authorized protests led to people being arrested and all the other problems we know about the closeness of chinese life that happens to this aerospace world where you find in some ways the foreign presence is very tightly integrated to chinese life then on it's own suggested bring the second part to an end for a brief third, almost all the dramas that are underway now in china, whether it can save the economy, the balance between central direction and local boosters which is so powerful as others, the ways in which is connected to the outside standards or not, these tensions are also being reflected in the aerospace world. let me now move briefly for two or three minutes to talking about china itself and i will confine myself to a point about china, a question about china and a point about china and the united states. i think a fascinating question and a crucial question for china, one that really is the one that lies behind this book would even beyond the importance of this book, it's important for china too which is whether china is ever going to be something different from what it is. here is what i mean. if you look back over 30 years in china you see places on recognizably different in countless ways. i was first there in the mid-1980s when my family and circumstances that i will tell you about if you ask, it was a very different place. we went around places and we had to get visas to get in there. now of course it is different, but it is different in a way that some chinese people think is reaching a limit, that the development model based on its low-wage factories where they make the ipad i hold in my hand that cost $500 only $50 in china come is that the formula for them to get rich in in the long-run? it's one thing to assemble products for apple in a different thing to have your own apple that you are developing. on manufacturing this infrastructure investment and construction of new cities and things all around the world and that may be nearing its limit even in china. there are only so many airports you can build and only so many 10 million person cities you can build and only so many new seaports. there's a fear of china entering what is called the lower income trap, becoming a bigger and more intense version of itself and never really becoming rich. that is under active debate by everybody in the chinese economic leadership saying if you look ahead 30 years imagine ourselves more like germany, like japan, like the united states or do we imagine ourselves more like mexico or a middle power that is developed in certain ways but hasn't become rich thoroughly? that is one huge question that runs to the current chinese reaction, economic tension of also to the political problems. we see the queen jong cheong -- the reason these matter is the following interesting connection. if we look back 20 or 30 years we know the people who said so confidently that if china prospers it will democratize. they were wrong. china has prospered and democratize very little. it's a lot more liberal but not as democratic. the question whether china can become rich if it does not become more liberal, it doesn't allow for free research for free press or free internet or whatever, that is one question about china that is the main one and the environmental want to consider. the question about the united states involves how we use the chinese example. something i believe very strongly is that the things that are right about america and wrong about america have almost nothing to do with china. the main connection in my view is that what is most right about america is its ability to contract and exploit an outsized share of talent from around the world. i say i'm glad to have them here and glad to have them trained here because it has a long-term beneficial influence in my view. i think what is good about america is not directly related to china. what is bad about america also in my view is not china's fault at all. it's her own responsibility for how her income is distributed and how our political system works and all the rest. the challenge for us with china is whether for another 20 or 30 years we can manage the same situation we have so far which is to say that we welcome support and can tolerate the emergence of a poor country as it moves up in both economic and diplomatic influence around the world without being directly threatened by that but while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which we disagree on strategic issues, on political value issues and all the rest. so i think there has been significant success by both leaderships of china and the united states over the last 30 years and in its relationship so it has not blown up and this huge shift of world power has cause more conflict than it has, to challenge them both sides whether that is possible 30 years or beyond. there is more i could say on a lot of these points but i think for now i will say, that is my opening pitch. i wrote this book because i thought i've seen something in my role as pilot in china that most people don't know about and it's revealing because it has a cast of characters. all the things interesting within china about how it modernizes the institutional relationships, central potential relationships increases in liberty and similar factors are in this drama too and finally there are large-scale tensions for china in its development and for our relations with that which i hope to shed some light on and i will be happy to discuss with you further. thanks for listening to this part of my presentation and i will be happy to hear the russians of jonathan weber of my former boss at into she standard -- -- where is john? john was my editor at industry-standard long ago. thanks for listening and i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> you thanks jim and thanks for the commonwealth club for presenting this forum. as jim mentioned, we were colleagues back when and i have been a jim fallows fan for my whole career. it was a great privilege to have him work and what i appreciated was that when i managed to convince jim to come on board one of my hopes was that he would be a bit of a role model for the very young staff that we have there and he accomplished that in and i greatly am appreciative of that. >> the magazine went from being the baddest magazine in the history of the world to not being around a year later but it was great while we were there. [laughter] >> that's right, rapid rise and fall. there are a lot of kinds of topics we could discuss and i thought i would start out by asking what i think is one of the core questions relating to american relationships with china and especially business relationships with china and it's certainly a core part of the book. and that has to do with how american companies and especially high-tech companies with intellectual property can and should relate to their chinese counterparts. you talk a lot about boeing's enormous role and the role of certain individuals in building up the aerospace industry and close relationship with boeing and other companies through their chinese counterparts. a cynic would say that is idiotic and they are essentially giving away their competitive edge and 15 years from now the chinese companies will put them out of business. how do you think about that? >> consistent with my past policies i think all attitudes are correct about this problem. let me talk about it first in general terms and then the sword of boeing specific situation. the chinese economy over the last 30 years is like the japanese economy after world war ii and like the u.s. economy from 18421890 and took significant advantage of other people's advantages and piggybacked on them. if you read charles dickens' travels on his travels through america he was furious about the pirated versions of the book very much like the pirated visions you see in china. this is an unfortunate but familiar traits so that is .1. .2 is the legitimate role of u.s. governmental policy and corporate strategies to put pressure on the chinese to change these practices. for example two weeks ago during the big strategic and economic dialogue between the u.s. and china in beijing that was overshadowed by the chong case, one of the things the u.s. was pushing harder for her was enforcement from the chinese officials. this is something where the outside world needs to keep pushing. here is a sign of progress or not, depending on how you feel. in china i have an actual genuine timex watch her but when i was living in china i have these 5-dollar rolexes. the difference between hong kong and mainland china is in mainland china you will say here by a rolex and in hong kong with his british rule of law they have to say thank rolex, think rolex so at solis there is transparency and labeling. i think the corporations must be hypervigilant about this and i will get to god in a second but also recognize that in the long run, china is going to be trapped if they can't solve this problem for its own corporations because it won't have its own pharmaceutical companies, its own corporations of any sort with international value if they can be protected its -- of its own people. if china is to -- becomes a kind of country that has its own boeing, apple in ge's and rolex, that will suggest a lot of other changes in how china has done its business so that is an important point and finally on aviation the crown jewel of aviation intellectual property -- ge and rolls-royce are properly thinking all the time about how they can do what they must to do some of their work inside china but also to keep their most important work safe. intel has charged that opening chip plants in china. >> and have they been properly vigilant? >> as they say time will tell but i think they are certainly hyperaware of this and write right at this moment, i think aerospace analysts think that the chinese aviation industry is extremely weak in engine technology. whether they still think that 20 years from now as a different matter but the ambition of ge and rolls-royce and practice to keep that place for a long time. if china succeeds it will suggests a lot of other things have been solved or change. >> on that point about other things being salt and changing and intellectual property and rule of law are good examples, and that plays into an idea that you mentioned earlier that somehow in order for china to become a wealthy country, it has to be sort of more western in a way for lack of a better word. and do you think that is in fact happening, or do you think it's true and do you think it's happening? >> the way i put the version i think of as true is this, that in the west we are used to thinking of democracy and liberalization as being part of one package. there there is liberal democracy and we think that is how things are. i think china's emergence suggests how they can be analytically and practically separated. china is really the only major country where people have no international leadership now and on the other hand it has become much more liberal than it was a generation ago. people can travel much more and they can read or things although still too few. so i think these liberal values, it's interesting, to look at the countries that are now rich, they differ in lots of ways but they'll have certain numbers of social traits. they respect the role of universities and the free press and free speech and of research and intellectual property and that kind of thing. that bundle of traits would have been talked about as big cultural basis of capitalism. i think that is something to become rich, china will need to manifest more of that and we will see whether that is possible. >> in terms of recent trends say over the last couple of years and with the current leadership change in the somewhat bumpy i guess you could say politely leadership change, do you think it's heading in that direction or is there chance it's essentially going to reverse? people talk about a left right split and being sort of a maoist come back of that. is that a possibility and will we essentially see a tightening of control as opposed to liberalization? >> yes. i think almost any as is possible. i will refrain from eating the elemental final part of my book which is a plea for whites it difficult to be sure of what is going to happen here, but let me give one of the most recent indicators of uncertainty. if you look back over 30 years, you can see that there are variations up and down in all the things who have been talking about of liberties, what in china are a more predictable government, and the trend has been positive. over a two to three-year period they have got more normal, more liberal, not western but less communist autocracy and arbitrary rule. in the last three years or so i think they have gone and reversed and there has been -- i describe in my book a condition of permanent -- where there is a special circumstance that requires cracking down whether it is the arab spring or boushey line. whether this is a three-year lip and the moving average is still going up or whether this is a turn. and i hope it's not a turn. i think most people in china hope it's not a turn but it could yet turn. i think they are part of the tension in the new leadership struggle is people with different views about what is the most wrong with china. there are some people who say what is most wrong with china is we have all these billionaires like the guy i saw in a gold bentley in beijing and the guy i saw moving past was pulling an ox cart with his shoulders. there are people who say there are too many billionaires and too many people being left a time. others say what is most with -- wrong with china is it's too arbitrary and not becoming rich and modern in a deep sense so these things as we speak are being played out. >> and would it be, would it be fair to think about that is sort of in terms of left right split, i mean is that useful? >> i think you could think of it that way. i think how bubbly it correctly leads them because the joke by a lot of my friends in beijing was the only communists in china was the cuban ambassador to beijing who was always writing these public letters and criticizing china for its revisionism and the lamborghini dealership being reconciled with the teachings of marks etc. so i think we can call it left-right but in terms of left and right are so embossed with what we have in mind that i tried to avoid that. >> do you think americans and america should fear china and in particular, you know there was a wave of sort of a fear of japan and someone else had asked this question. there is a great fear of japan at one point and that turned out to be misplaced. now there is a sort of a fear of china. do you think annie how does that compare -- how does japan and china compare and secondly, is it a good response? >> let me say something about japan, something about the fear in china. two of the most different countries i have ever been in our japan and china. there are obviously some similarities in religious heritage and are based system but in terms of just their look and feel and operations they are really different. a metaphor i brought up in being japan was it was like living inside a baywatch, where everything is so tightly machined and there is a lot of extra room for you where china is like living in a giant -- where there is always something new to be done. when it comes to the matter of competition i still tank that the japanese technological competition over the last 25 years was actually more threatening to the united states because you have these head-to-head national champions. you had toshiba and toyota and sony. there are no counterparts for that in china. japan has had legal catastrophes on its own so japan and china have you as different situations and i think there was reason to be more fearful of japan. on the phenomena phenomenon of fear itself, i did an article after moving back from china china to ask briefly are we going to hell in america and are we falling apart? one of the interesting things in the story is that america has always craved the specter of imminent collapse of as a way of doing business. [laughter] the first sermon on the decline of america delivered on u.s. soil was in 1630. in 1620 things were great but kids today have lost their values. [laughter] so it is part of how we are that we have the sense to vehement decline. it is part of our propulsive nature. i think if foreign challenges could he used in a constructive way, saying that the chinese can build this wind energy plant, why can't we do it to matt? that is in a menacing way we are about to be slaves of the chinese is not useful. finally, fearing china, china has so many more problems than the u.s. that you wouldn't know where to start in for people who have spent much time in the interior of china the idea that you are should be afraid of the country which has more poor peasants and we have people and which has environmental problems you can imagine and where a party boss told me a couple of years ago something that stayed in my mind. he said you americans think of everything in china multiplied by 1.3 trillion we think of everything divided by 1.3 billion so i think we should not be afraid of china but we should take it seriously. 's fees so the office is about aviation and there a lot of special characteristics about the aviation industry. i wonder if you think that the way in which other industries in china are comparable or different and is so different in what way? >> i was using aerospace and aviation has an example of a category i described as -- and i will describe how they are different. the development has happened that has been amazingly -- by outside companies and investors. if you look at japan during its industrialization it was very hard for outside corporations to invest there. you go to china and the big factories are american, german and korean in some and some of them are japanese so there is then this external finance factory boom in construction boom and all the rest. the significance of the kind of industries and corporations that china does not have our ones like pharmaceuticals or world popular or certain kinds of applications and aerospace to matt because to succeed in the center sees, i call it an apex industry because there's a whole substructure of successes you have to have worked out, certain kinds of research institutions, certain kinds of quality standards, political military relations and all the rest. so aerospace, clean energy, pharmaceuticals, high-end infotech, these are things the chinese want to develop and haven't yet. so i think the reason i use industry as a specimen is it is a representative specimen for all the odd traits of the target that the planners of the 13th and 14th beyond that have been few. >> so when you look at the way, the specifics of how aerospace is developing and you talk of this center about siam out of second pair with the early development of the aerospace in the u.s.? >> the origins of aerospace in the u.s. and china could not be more different in that there have been every factor in the u.s. creates this diverse psychology were of course there was an industry in los angeles but also in wichita and in new york and the dallas-fort worth area so when the u.s. we had similar emergence of lots of entrepreneurs in the early 20th century, the wright brothers and everybody who followed them. we have the multiplicity of funding sources. the army air force was purchased by the wright brothers but also the postal service and maybe the most ineffective industrial policy in the u.s. by having air mail, saying this would be the market for airplanes and we had airports all over the place. we have the very rich structure. in china this has been the military from day one. airspace was controlled militarily. if you go to big chinese cities they are extremely noisy but not noisy from overhead. despite mr. shue's best efforts, airports are usually far away so is the effort almost like the russian soviet economy of going from a military run system, trying to will it into the civilian world, and that is -- trying to liberalize something by central government. is a trick but something the chinese have learned over the last 30 years and this is an interesting test case for them. >> do you think some of the things -- to talk of all these airports and giant airports in the middle of nowhere. do you think that those are going to need airports or do you think 20 years from now they will look like white elephants? >> the white elephant category of china is a heavily populated one. you have seen the slideshows of cities that can hold to the million people. it's worth recognizing that even by their mere existence they serve an important role for china and that people have been at work building these things. is also the case of infrastructure that infrastructure in china has been under build so far so the under building will be caught up soon or later. the united states has about 5000 airports across this land mass landmass of which 100 plus our big commercial airliners. china has fewer than 500 airports of any kind whatsoever so they are trying to ramp that up. a lot of things look like completely wacky booster projects. i described one of them, where people in the equivalent of some oh that built this huge runway with the idea that they are going to attract -- become the concurrence of silicon valley and disney world and universal studios and the seattle owing factories all in place. they are probably not owing to do that but the idea is there her so much pent-up demand that there'll be some take-up of the slack in the meantime they are creating jobs so that keynesianism in its finest form. >> is there the best you can tell grassroots enthusiasm for a lot of this? you talk about kind of the general enthusiasm in china about the future and the joy of the prospects, but does that really extend to the broadly and specifically about aviation, so if you talk to a peasant and they say yeah we are going to have airplanes or do they not really care? >> some of them would say that. i described a man i met at the hong kong airshow year and half ago the same place where he saw the business jet with a suitcase full of cash. this was the guy who probably in his late fifties, had suffered during the cultural revolution and said he always dreamed of being a pilot when he was a little boy but he failed what he called the body exam and i did not ask him what exactly that meant. so it became -- he became a welder for some chinese industry and the ended up making a ton of money selling structural steel for floral expeditions around china. there were enough of these that they had become very rich. he now is building his own airplanes himself and his machine shop and flying them around northeast china and the men shura area. he was buying his own serous airplane which is a couple hundred thousand dollar airplane at the hong kong airshow and he is inking my childhood dream has come true. i would say in the variety of the country of a billion plus people there's a whole lot of cynicism and a whole lot of jadedness and a whole lot of what the chinese called eating business -- bitterness. the kind of cockeyed optimism that was often described about america in the early 20th century, you see more of now and more chinese people than i think you do here, maybe not in silicon valley but america as a whole, peoples aimed in a sentence my dream is and however it ends may vary but my dream is x feeling among people, which is fun to be part of. 's the one very good question that came from the audience when you read the book and read about these things and you talk a lot about the entrepreneurs and these guys who have created things from nothing through all these dreams but it is in fact almost all guys. what is the role and prospects for female entrepreneurs in china? >> i think the chinese, anybody who has spent time in china recognizes that chinese women are the dominant force in chinese society, not structurally but in terms of force of will and force of personality and cunning and all the rest. many many times you will find chinese businesses, not big corporations for small and vicious ones where women have a role there. in terms of political representation they are underrepresented by u.s. standards and there is of course discrimination against girl babies versus boys and all the rest. i described china's most famous female pilot who is a real piece of work. i will say one thing about her. she is probably in her mid-40s now and she's pictured in kim kardashian type poses. she travels with the company with her teenage son so she can i say this is my son. most people think we are siblings. [laughter] the kind of rolls his eyes and i think he is going off to deerfield. aviation is mainly a male world but i think the texture of chinese society is important female in his strength, ingenuity and charm and warmth. >> you people see the emergence of prominent female entrepreneurs in china? >> yes. it was the case a couple of years ago that the richest person in china was the woman who had a scrap recycling business. there was a woman who probably has appeared here and it's a very important factor in journalism in china and finding ways is an entrepreneurial journalist so yes i think we will see more prominent women playing roles of all sorts in china including as entrepreneurs. >> the last question which the card is he here, sorry to question. with that preface what he think is the most important thing our american high school students to understand about china? >> let me think how to answer that. i think that they should learn to feel comfortable with it. by that i don't mean margie knuckle under to it, learn to revere it. not necessarily learned the language although it's easier when you are a high but rather to feel at ease with rather than threatened by a world in which china plays a large part. i think one the best things for china is so many of its people have studied in the united states so either they stay here which is good for us or they go back to china which i rank is good for both china and the united states because they are culture it it is in certain ways. if we could find ways including spending time in their teens or 20s, to find a way to spend months or a year there so they're comfortable with it and recognized in their world if this is going to be a factor, not that one has to be their main business or they have to learn about it at making it an accepted a natural part of their mental university. that i would say is the most important thing for young americans to do. >> we will end with a complement comment. as a long-time reader your work in the atlantic and as a listener on mpr is it is a pleasure to hear you. i would second that and thank you very much. >> it's a real honor to be here and i appreciate your great moderation and thank you for being here on a lovely evening. 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