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 i