Flight, Flag, and Culture: The Making of the Chinese Aviation Complex and the Infrastructural State
China’s aviation complex has been buttressed with lofty ambitions and messy anxieties alike. Policies for the development of China’s aviation industry reflected both administrative and epistemic contentions with the conditions of modernity and what it heralded for nation-building and its citizenry. In Chiang Kai-shek’s 1934 collection of lectures, Citizenry and Aviation (Guomin Yu Hangkong), Chiang lamented the backward (luohou) standards of China’s first forays into aviation, arguing that China’s survival and cultural advancement were contingent on developing a wholly Chinese aviation complex. In Maoist China, the state carrier, CAAC Airlines, often presented their guests with cultural gifts that most concisely represented (to the managers, at least) what was Chinese civilization, including full bottles of the notorious Maotai, the fiery albeit expensive spirit that graced the ostentatious banquet that Zhou Enlai threw for Nixon in 1972. As with the aviation industries of modern nation-states, the narratives of flight, flag, and culture are inextricably intertwined in the iterations of China’s investment in the skies.
The Chinese aviation complex has come a long way since the formation of its first airlines in 1926. Yet, to frame the project as a Chinese catch-up story through its aviation complex is to dull the historical richness of China’s increasingly sophisticated rein over its aviation industry and forget how aviation has contributed to the re-thinking and re-organizing of the spatial, capitalist, cultural, and imaginative bounds of China and its transnational claims of sovereignty and border security. This project is thus interested in how flight, culture, and nationalism converge in the construction of China’s aviation complex – and how it was built on messy and complex negotiations of what it meant to be Chinese. These ideological processes are intertwined with a formidable array of empirical concerns – – and they cannot be read in isolation from the management practices and operations and how they characterize the roots of the contemporary Chinese "infrastructural state."
