One Billion Customers - James McGregor [91]
“How can this fit anybody’s definition of high-tech?” Bruns asked.
The Chinese weren’t laughing. They had bought tools to build their aircraft industry and they had received junk. The head of the Nanchang plant wrote a letter to Hitt in September apologizing for violating any U.S. regulations but also expressing surprise that the secondhand tools were so tightly regulated. He had purchased far more advanced machinery from Europe without having to obtain any licenses.
Hitt and Bruns deduced that CATIC and its bureaucratic counterparts at the four factories were engaged in the usual infighting and harebrained business schemes of Chinese government companies. CATIC, eager to amass profits, had added a healthy markup to the tools it intended to sell to the four factories, but the factory managers refused. They wanted state-of-the-art equipment, not America’s hand-me-downs. Meanwhile, CATIC’s planned fifth factory never got off the ground. CATIC was stuck with the tools.
Hitt and Bruns never determined exactly how the tools wound up in the Nanchang factory. They were relieved that it didn’t seem to matter. The Commerce Department apparently considered it a case of Chinese commercial chicanery rather than a serious national security violation by McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas forced CATIC to box up the metal press and ship it along with the rest of the tools to the Trunkliner factory in Shanghai. In February 1996, the Commerce Department amended the export licenses so that McDonnell Douglas could use the tools in Shanghai. But McDonnell Douglas engineers considered the machines outdated and unusable. They were rusting in their crates a decade after leaving Columbus.
Rocket Science
While Bob Hitt and John Bruns slogged through the machine tool mess, Gareth Chang had his own technology troubles at Hughes, troubles that had started even before he joined Hughes. In December 1992, a Chinese Long March rocket carrying the Hughes-manufactured Optus B2 satellite exploded forty-eight seconds after liftoff from the remote Xichang launch center in western China.
Hughes had turned to China because there was no other way to get its satellites into space. To justify its enormously expensive space shuttle plans, the U.S. government had decided to phase out expendable rockets and use the shuttles to deploy satellite and other payloads in space. But then the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. NASA prohibited the use of shuttles for commercial payloads at the time when satellite demand was soaring as the digital age brought advances in satellite television and telecommunications and global data distribution. The United States had some 90 percent of the market share of commercial satellites, but if Hughes, Loral, and Lockheed Martin couldn’t get their birds into space, they would be out of business. Russia had some launch capacity available, but the U.S. government wouldn’t allow American satellites to be launched from the Soviet Union. The European launch consortium Arianespace had no extra capacity. China, however, had plenty of rockets and was looking for business.
Like other forms of complex technology, satellite launchings suffered from American schizophrenia. The Tiananmen Massacre prompted Congress to prohibit the launch of U.S. satellites on Chinese rockets unless the president issued a “national interest” waiver. For the next several years