Chinese National Aviation Corporation

The China National Aviation Corporation was a Chinese airline, it was nationalized after the Communist Party of China took control in 1949 (as Civil Aviation Administration of China). It was a major airline in the Republic of China.

As of 1938 it was headquartered in Shanghai.

On April 5 1929 the State Council of the National government of China based at Nanking established the Chinese National Aviation Corporation, a wholly owned government company with an authorized capital of ten million dollars, Chinese currency: Sun Fo, Minister of Railways and son of Sun Yat Sen served as its first president although the real power lay with the Minister of Communications, Wang Po-Chun.

Two weeks later on April 17, the Nationalists entered into a service contract with an American firm, Aviation Exploration Inc which was to establish air routes between a few of the major Treaty ports and manage all operations. Aviation Exploration Inc was a personal holding company of the U.S. aviation magnate Clement Melville Keys who at the same time was the president of Curtiss-Wright and a few other aviation firms. In June 1929 Keys set up China Airways to manage the new airmail routes between Canton, Shanghai and Hankow.

This new Sino-American venture faced acute resistance from military factions in South China: warlords had their own small air forces which had ambitions to earn income from airmail service between the treaty ports. Even more ominous was the opposition from Wang Po-chun the Minister of Communications; in July 1929 he went ahead and set up an airmail service owned entirely by his ministry. He became in effect the father of China's civil aviation.

Despite all the odds, on October 21 1929 China Airways launched the airmail and passenger service with an inaugural flight from Shanghai to Hankow. it continued to face overwhelming political and financial difficulties, not least from the Ministry of Communications which not only collected airmail revenue from its own service but from that of China Airways.

By the start of 1930 China Airways was at the point of bankruptcy and threatened to stop operations altogether unless the Ministry of Communications released its revenue. An old China hand named Max Polin managed to broker a new deal between China Airways and the Ministry of Communication. On July 8 the two rival airmail operators merged into a reconfigured China National Aviation Corporation, which thereafter was better known by its acronym, CNAC. The Chinese government had a 55 percent share and 'Keys' interests had a 45 percent share in CNAC. The Keys share in CNAC wound up in Intercontinent Aviation, another holding company that he had established in 1929 to handle foreign airline investments; by that stage Intercontinent itself had become part of North American Aviation, another firm founded by Keys in 1928.

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