Jiakai Jeremy Chua

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: In 1931, Deutsche Luft Hansa and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government came together in Shanghai to form the Sino-German airline joint-venture, Eurasia Aviation Corporation. Sun Yat-sen’s vision of turning towards international cooperation to help build a new and prosperous Chinese Republic was put to the test. For the next decade, Eurasia would ply the skies over China and beyond, carrying both passengers, mail, and cargo through peacetime and war as part of its mandate to project newfound state modernities and enable a sustainable and viable Chinese aviation complex against growing airline competition and the omnipresent threat of military aggression from Japan. Nevertheless, scholars of Modern China like William Kirby have characterized Eurasia as a failure of Nationalist incompetence to astutely leverage technology transfer towards state-building. By tracing the founding, development, and dissolution of Eurasia Aviation Corporation, this paper seeks to overturn Kirby’s paradigm of the “dominant parent” enterprise where the foreign party controlled the fates and destinies of Sino-foreign JVs, often to the detriment of the Chinese side. Using official communication and contracts between Luft Hansa, the Executive Yuan, Eurasia, and the various ministries that had purview over the Sino-foreign JV as well as putting them in context with German aerophilatelic catalogues, route networks of Eurasia, and Chiang’s lectures on The Chinese Citizenry and Aviation (Guomin yu Hangkong), this paper proposes that Nationalist state actors were capable of formidable and strategic stewardship over the business that transcended the formal equality on paper. While Eurasia collapsed due to a combination of diplomatic disputes and its increasingly tenuous commerciality, it at once engendered an extensive domestic aviation network and established managerial tenors that provided models for later state-led developments in the contemporary Chinese airline industry.

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: In the wake of the all-out price wars between US carriers after the passage of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, the Frequent Flyer Program (FFP) emerged as a distinct competitive strategy for airlines to at once differentiate their brands and retain customer loyalty. The imperative of the FFP was simple if crude: a combination of elite benefits and “miles” as a rebate for present flying translated into enhanced creature comforts and gratis future flights. The FFPs captured the aspirational imaginations of their customers – a phenomenon deftly portrayed in the 2009 film, Up in the Air. Nevertheless, what was once purely a cost center in its earliest incarnations has developed into one of the most profitable revenue channels for all North American carriers – so much so that contemporary airline operations like American have mustered the incredible art of profit through FFPs even while losing money actually transporting passengers. The FFP remains an essential but arcane component of airline companies – its economics is not well-understood by scholars, the currency of a mile is often shaped by whims and corporate fiat, and there is an accounting blackhole where the FFP stands within a firm. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public fillings have revealed that valuations of FFPs are outsized to the market cap of the airlines, which warrant both scrutiny and concern. This paper traces the beginnings and development of North American FFPs from 1978 to its present forms. I argue that while the original innovation of the FFP was to engineer a sustainable customer base based on luxury marketing and targeted discrimination, contemporary FFPs are predicated on dangerous speculation, delayed and oft-unfulfilled “futurities”, and a wholly unregulated market -- subjecting customers to one-sided capricious inflationary risks while also posing immense financial risks for airlines, their lenders, and their shareholders.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: The Frequent Flyer Program (FFP) emerged as airlines competed to differentiate their brands and retain customer loyalty. The FFP bestowed airlines unprecedented access and insight to their customers, and it also ignited the aspirational imaginations of their passengers through elite status and accruable currencies for future free flights. With the advent of cross-marketing channels via credit card companies and banks in the early 90s, what was once purely a cost center in its earliest incarnations, the FFP, has developed into a profitable revenue channel behind any global airline operation. Yet, the “value” of a mile is often shaped by whims and corporate fiat. How American Airlines managed the incredible art of profit through its FFP while losing money transporting passengers in FY2019 attests to public fillings during the COVID-19 pandemic that have revealed internal valuations of FFPs as outsized to market caps of the airlines. Meanwhile, the “value” of a mile to a consumer continues to shift as airlines also unilaterally adjust their liabilities through FFP mechanics. Using GIS and critical cartography, I argue that the historical “value” of a mile is deliberately subjective and a product of spatial ontologies and cartographic manipulations that were embedded in redemption award charts of FFPs. This has enabled contemporary forms of the FFPs to be predicated on dangerous speculation and easy manipulations, leading to deliberately delayed and oft-unfulfilled “futurities” of a mile. Not dissimilar to contemporary anxieties about invented currencies and their effects on states and markets, the innovation of FFPs and the shifting values of mileage currencies may also pose systemic risk to airlines, consumers, and the financial system.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: 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."