It turns out that the Nationalist leader (and at least one of his subordinates) was “obsessed” with airplanes and viewed the development of Chinese aviation as a means for transforming his countrymen and unifying the nation. Baumler speculates that Chiang’s air-minded interests mirrored the widespread European fascination with flight in the inter-War period, particularly in 1930s Nazi Germany.

Perhaps. It seems to me though that it isn’t necessary to travel that far West in search of precedents to Chiang’s aerial obsession. In fact, it may be possible to identify the origins of Chiang’s fascination with flight without even leaving China.

On 13 July 1925 four Soviet airplanes landed in the Chinese capital. They were the remnants of a larger squadron that had departed Moscow six weeks earlier with the goal of demonstrating the USSR’s “sympathy and friendship for the Chinese people” by flying to Peking. Known as the “Great Flight” (Великий перелет), the mission was history’s first premeditated attempt to promote international goodwill through the use of aviation. [I discuss the details of the Great Flight in Chapter Six of DotA.]

While I have no way of measuring Chinese responses to the Soviet propaganda mission, given the high-level diplomatic negotiations that took place in advance, the audacious scope of the enterprise, and the widespread media coverage devoted to the event (journalists, cameramen, and a film crew flew along to document everything for the Bolshevik state), it seems reasonable to conclude that the Great Flight would have attracted the attention of interested officials and military leaders like Chiang. Perhaps it even inspired his original interest in aviation?

The “Russian connection” seems all the more plausible given the marked similarity of Chiang’s ideas to those advanced by Bolshevik Party propagandists during their 1923 Campaign to Build the Red Air Fleet. [Chiang's reported ideas bear an uncanny similarity to those first expressed in Leon Trotsky's pamphlet Aviation: Instrument of the Future (1923).] Likewise, while the Nationalists’ efforts to raise money through public donations can be traced to the national subscription campaigns popular in Western Europe and Imperial Russia prior to 1914, the practice of allowing enterprises and organizations to sponsor airplanes by donating the funds for their construction was first adopted by ODVF and Dobrolet. Not coincidentally (perhaps), several of these “factory-built” Soviet aircraft participated in the Great Flight.

Although the USSR more frequently followed than led when it came to the development of breakthrough aviation technologies, the country was often at the forefront in devising innovative ways of popularizing that technology. Ironically, it may well be that Russian Communists inspired the air-minded notions of China’s ill-fated Nationalist leader.

Whatever the case, I’d love to learn about the Chinese reaction to the arrival of the Great Flight squadron. The event would serve as a terrific vehicle for undertaking an article or essay on the origins of Chinese airmindedness.

Someone should get to work on this. Professor Baumler?

ScP

I don’t doubt the accuracy of Brett’s assessment regarding British public opinion and I think he’s on the right track in attempting to assess the nature of the British experience by drawing comparisons and contrasts with other nations’ responses. Even so, while the optimism/pessimism dichotomy may be a good way of beginning discussion and suggesting further avenues of research, beyond that, I’m not certain that it helps us better understand the origins or characteristics of, say, American or British aviation culture.

Like all new technologies, the airplane produced its fair share of both optimism and pessimism within (and across) those societies immediately influenced by its development. This was certainly the case in Russia where Imperial statesmen and private patrons optimistically hailed the airplane’s potential to strengthen the nation and promote culture at the same time others (especially within the artistic world) pessimistically focused on aviation’s destructive potential. Later, in the 1920s, Bolshevik Party officials made use of both visions of aviation to advance their political goals.

A more interesting issue is the one that Brett raises in a follow up comment on Revise & Dissent. Again in reference to Corn’s Winged Gospel he writes:

“I’d also like to know of any other countries which have gone through this almost religious enthusiasm for technology (atomic energy might be another, briefer example). Tremendous optimism, sure — think of Victorian Britain, all those steamships, railways, canals, telegraph cables, heroic engineers — but the religious flavouring does seem to be an American thing (to my untutored eye, anyway).”

I’ve argued that Russia was one such country in which religion played a vital role in shaping aviation culture, though it did so in a manner unlike that in the United States. However, my take on The Winged Gospel is different from Brett’s. As I understood the book, Corn did not argue (as Brett seems to imply) that America’s optimistic response to the airplane resulted from a “religious enthusiasm for technology” but, rather, that America’s enthusiastic response to aviation technology was largely a product of its underlying religious optimism.

This is an important distinction, as it does more than simply describe the fact of America’s enthusiasm for aviation. It offers an explanation for that enthusiasm by identifying as its source a particular vision of the future rooted in the unique religious traditions and customs of the American past. Given the near universal symbolic presence of flight with religious and spiritual traditions the world over, the intersection of faith and flight strikes me as a topic deserving much more attention.

ScP