From one of our most influential journalists, here is a timely, vital, and illuminating account of the next stage of China's modernization—its plan to rival America as the world's leading aerospace power and to bring itself from its low-wage past to a high-tech future.

Over the past ten years air traffic has declined in most of the world, but in China it has more than doubled. Most of the airports under construction are being built in China, which is also where Boeing and Airbus are looking for most of their future growth in sales. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. 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. To underscore the seriousness of its purpose, the government acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aircraft, makers of the world's most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus. In China Airborne , James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of China's project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Completing this remarkable picture, Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi'an, 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 China's 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 world—and the right ways for us to respond.