alt.hn

5/20/2026 at 5:48:52 PM

Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

 https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/missile-genius-america-lost-and-china-gained

by thnaks

5/20/2026 at 5:19:17 PM

That's fascinating.

The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring. Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie.

Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.

by Animats

5/20/2026 at 9:59:24 PM

> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.

Still issue (seriously).

He might be an expert at building organizations in real life, but there is no rule that a movie about him has to focus on that part. Movies are not documentaries.

Examples: Oppenheimer, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Jobs, Social Media, and literally every movie that sells tbh.

by raincole

5/21/2026 at 2:26:34 PM

I really don't think your argument is very convincing. Some of your examples are downright ridiculous? "Jobs" Making a movie about one of the creation of some of one of the most famous companies on Earth is obviously interesting. That's not comparable at all.

by KalMann

5/21/2026 at 8:24:26 PM

If you actually watched Jobs you would know it has very little to do with how Apple was actually created in real life.

Of course a movie about Steve Jobs is inherently more marketable than one about Qian Xuesen. But one isn't inherently more boring than the other.

by raincole

5/21/2026 at 5:39:47 PM

> Making a movie about one of the creation of some of one of the most famous companies on Earth is obviously interesting.

That's not what "Jobs" is about. It's the setting of a character-driven dramatization of Steve Job's life and his personality. You do not grow a company like Apple merely by dominating rooms with your personality, dropping oneliners and speaking in absolutes. There's a lot of actual work involved, the details of which would make for a movie rather boring to most audiences.

"Jobs" is a movie about Apple as much as "Inglourious Basterds" is a movie about the US military in WW2.

by chmod775

5/20/2026 at 11:43:34 PM

I'd love to see a movie about the "managers" Mervin Kelly and/or William Shockley. Less military oriented perhaps, but seems that period of Bell Labs just was something else for some reason, in terms of impact on the world.

by embedding-shape

5/21/2026 at 3:13:35 AM

Shockley? The guy whose employees hated him so much they went and founded a rival company which then gave rise to Silicon Valley?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

by vitus

5/21/2026 at 11:02:12 AM

Shockley might have been a better researcher/engineer than manager, still I'm sure a movie about his early days, including the alienation of some of the people he recruited later, would be an interesting watch :)

by embedding-shape

5/21/2026 at 4:29:02 AM

The more interesting the movie could be!

by bberkgaut

5/21/2026 at 9:30:48 AM

Never underestimate the lifelong inspiration of a bad boss.

by bryanrasmussen

5/20/2026 at 7:33:55 PM

There are biopic films about people who founded or transformed businesses like Steve Jobs, Roy Kroc, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Blackberry, etc. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but I wouldn't describe that genre as boring. Probably the bigger issue is getting people to see a biopic about someone who isn't already a household name.

by jjk166

5/20/2026 at 9:36:53 PM

Putting Steve Jobs next to Charles Wilson is an insult to Wilson.

by vasco

5/20/2026 at 7:49:02 PM

And if Qian is truly comparable to Oppenheimer, well...

by Apocryphon

5/21/2026 at 3:58:47 AM

If people are wondering why the linked article doesn't contain the movie reference, the original article was https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strat... which specifically mentions that this is more than a "blunder" but a loss of empiricism and pragmatism during the McCarthy era, along with various caveats and historical detail around Soviet and Chinese attitudes around the methodology Qian brought.

by danieltanfh95

5/21/2026 at 3:43:34 AM

they completely glossed over Graves in Oppenheimer, one of the many reasons I hated that movie. There's a great "scene" in "the making of the atomic bomb" that also appears in the movie that they botched. Something along the way of oppenheimer stressing over "how do we pick the right way to make the bomb" and graves saying "simple, we do all of them". There's so much interesting material there and they instead focused on bed sheets.

by grogenaut

5/21/2026 at 12:22:03 AM

> The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy.

What are you talking about? The article doesn't say no one made a movie about him.

There are at least three Chinese movies and a TV series about him.

by xiii1408

5/21/2026 at 9:52:04 AM

Probably morden production. When I was a kid in the 90s he's a giant figure in the books taught often in school (his birthplace is very close to my city too which makes him a local national hero) and well known as model figure. But not anything in the media. Maybe even earlier times before me.

by dumb1224

5/21/2026 at 3:18:00 PM

The Americans didn't make a movie about him, because it's too humiliating.

by angry_octet

5/21/2026 at 2:31:11 AM

> Hyman Rickover<snip>only has a low budget 2021 documentary

Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power (2014) www.imdb.com/title/tt3717180/

I tried to sit through this one, but it was such a chore to watch.

by dylan604

5/20/2026 at 7:48:34 PM

But they did make a biopic about a Charles Wilson and a war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)

by Apocryphon

5/20/2026 at 8:03:56 PM

That one, about a member of Congress, has a sex scene in a hot tub. It had movie potential.

The Roy Krock movie worked because audiences understand McDonalds. Trying to explain the relationship between R&D policy and defense spending is much tougher. Although see Heinlein's "Destination Moon".

by Animats

5/20/2026 at 8:34:22 PM

I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.

Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)

But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?

by Apocryphon

5/20/2026 at 9:02:20 PM

> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy

Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.

by fragmede

5/20/2026 at 10:08:22 PM

True, given that he was a wartime administrator maybe they can just throw in a few battle scenes and military engagements to show the fruits of his labor. Start it framed as a WWII epic centered on a civilian, like The King's Speech, Darkest Hour, etc. Then it turns into Cold War intrigue. Maybe throw in some auto nostalgia for GM classic vehicles of the era.

by Apocryphon

5/20/2026 at 11:59:30 PM

They made a movie about Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation, though. It was called “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.

Well, that might have been a movie about Edward Teller, or possibly John von Neumann. Nobody is quite sure.

by photochemsyn

5/20/2026 at 9:53:16 PM

Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts? There are bombs scenes but majority of the movie is the supposed boring stuff

by gloryjulio

5/21/2026 at 10:26:30 AM

> Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts?

The film tells two interwoven stories: one follows Oppenheimer's career, the other about how Oppenheimer's loyalty was questioned.

It is a character study and a moral reckoning, preoccupied with he guilt and dread of having created a weapon capable of ending humanity.

by andsoitis

5/21/2026 at 2:33:14 AM

Fat Man and Little Boy was also about the process and story of the people in the program more than it was about the bomb.

A topic just needs a good writer to make the story interesting.

by dylan604

5/21/2026 at 3:45:06 AM

most of the movie is about his personal thoughts about making the bomb and the direction things go with brinkman ship. I disliked the movie because it spent so little time on on the building.

by grogenaut

5/20/2026 at 7:45:32 PM

> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.

Well, part of the Oppenheimer biopic is about J. Robert being thrust into that kind of role.

> Oppenheimer ... rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Los_Alam...

by SideburnsOfDoom

5/21/2026 at 6:29:50 AM

Besides founding JPL, Qian also co-founded the university I graduated from, USTC (University of Science and Technology 中国科学技术大学), one of the most prestigious schools in China. He headed the Department of Modern Mechanics for 20+ years and was so notoriously strict that the university had to extend its graduation track from 4 years to 5, as he refused to let students graduate without a thorough understanding of science.

Legend has his infamous, multi-hour-long finals had only one question:

With no calculators/computers allowed, calculate the trajectory of a rocket launched from Earth that will orbit the Moon.

by tianshuo

5/20/2026 at 8:59:34 PM

The US continues to repeat this mistake by adding hurdles for immigrant talent while persecuting or being generally racist against Chinese-American scientists [1]. Despite that, there's still a net influx of foreign talent coming to the US whereas relatively few people move to China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_the_...

by porphyra

5/20/2026 at 9:04:11 PM

I understood that as the actual thesis of the article; it discusses the highest profile example in detail, but the central claim seems to be that this was essentially the system working "as intended", and that it continued working this way through today.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 3:59:44 AM

Exactly what I was trying to convey.

by danieltanfh95

5/21/2026 at 6:38:10 AM

> whereas relatively few people move to China

The Haigui waves for the last few years are quite huge

by eunos

5/21/2026 at 8:16:45 AM

Supposedly OP meant foreign nationals instead of overseas Chinese, while Haigui is even a broader term for anyone with a overseas degree. On the other hand, there is large exodus post 2022 due to domestic COVID-19 policies.

by handle584

5/21/2026 at 9:33:37 AM

Right but at current situation, if China could pulls more Haigui as time goes it is still a huge win.

by eunos

5/21/2026 at 5:23:13 AM

As a rational American, I find it infuriating to see that kind of thing going on, as though it doesn't work out to our benefit to get the most brilliant minds in science, business, and math to not just study here but settle here and contribute to helping our companies compete with Chinese companies. We should be making these people offers that are too attractive to pass up. It shouldn't be on them to do mountains of paperwork to prove themselves any more than it was on LeBron James to apply to work for the Cavs. He was scouted and recruited. Merit-based scholarships should be used to increase the number of exceptional international students, and then the best professors should be in charge of nominating the most exceptional talents to be offered packages on graduation that put them on an easy and automatic track - guaranteed work visas and automatic path to citizenship after a few years of residency.

It's a pity that a completely unrelated type of immigration problem at the border has been in any way confused with what our policies should be towards people who are so strategically beneficial to us.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 11:23:52 AM

I guess we should forget about:

• Larry Wu-tai Chin

• Peter Lee

• Chi Mak

• Katrina Leung

• Shujun Wang

• Fei Ye

• Ming Zhong

• Walter Lian-Heen Liew

• Kun Shan Chun

• Jinchao Wei

• Eileen Wang

All convicted of espionage

by OrvalWintermute

5/21/2026 at 4:17:01 PM

It’s too early for xenophobic christo-fascist boogeyman narratives, man.

by boston_clone

5/21/2026 at 3:21:06 AM

That wikipage over-focuses on modern rightwing racism to the exclusion of modern leftwing racism against the Chinese. It doesn't account for how 2020's White Progressives treated Chinese-Americans as "white-adjacent" second-class constituents. For example, by funding front-groups that claimed authority over US Chinese & Asian concerns, from an almost exclusively partisan angle.

https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/04/12/grandpa-vicha-aapi...

The marginalization of Chinese-Americans by Progressives is a common frustration for recent Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area. It's a deeper resentment for local Chinese-Americans who eventually drove a recall campaign ousting SF's infamously progressive DA.

by hitekker

5/21/2026 at 1:44:16 PM

Crazy even Garry Tan can't write his own opinion blogs anymore

by verall

5/21/2026 at 5:30:19 AM

Wild that you're being downvoted. Mainstream "progressives" openly champion racial quotas which directly hurt Asian students in college admissions. Asians faced racism and unfairness in the past like many other groups did, but because their kids studied hard anyway and got a 4.5 GPA, suddenly we shouldn't consider their ancestors' poor treatment. Different rules than other minorities, apparently.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 6:08:04 AM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

5/20/2026 at 2:29:16 PM

What became JPL had numerous colorful characters who had trouble with the security apparatus not least

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons

who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

by PaulHoule

5/20/2026 at 8:15:52 PM

“Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money”

How does this man not have a movie?

by madaxe_again

5/20/2026 at 8:40:24 PM

[dead]

by stefantalpalaru

5/20/2026 at 3:26:09 PM

An error rate of 0 is unachievable. Given that, it’s a question of your tolerance for error and the consequences of the opposite kind of error. Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties.

The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely.

After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer.

Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.

by arjie

5/20/2026 at 9:18:27 PM

> Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties.

At least on the American side, it doesn't sound at all like this was uniformly agreed upon; there seem to have been people on the American side (including at least one relatively high-ranking military/government official) who felt strongly that this was a strategic blunder. That doesn't mean your counterargument is incorrect, but I don't think it's as simple as "they knew what they were giving up".

A large part of the argument of the article seems to be that the political pressures for the US were misaligned with the long-term incentives, which is a plausible explanation for why the president (who is not a subject matter expert for most things) might override a decision from someone who is much more knowledgeable about the specific circumstances. There are plenty of places to disagree with the analysis presented (e.g. whether it's preferable to have a system that optimizes for this sort of long-term planning or if other things should take precedence), but it's not clear to me from your comment whether you're actually trying to disagree with the conclusions they draw or about the history of what happened.

To be clear, disagreeing about the history would be reasonable, given that understanding what happened is rarely straightforward from reading a single secondary source like this, but if that's what you're doing, it might help to be more explicit about it.

by saghm

5/20/2026 at 9:57:15 PM

Ah, I wasn't clear I see. Okay, my position is not that the representation is inaccurate but that given the representation it is not clear that it was the wrong decision. The post draws a line from Xuesen's deportation, to his actions in China, to China's present-day military aviation. But that is only a blunder if the counterfactual is that China would not have achieved that military aviation as fast. The picture drawn is that the Chinese had a sophisticated and intelligent organizational apparatus that knew to get key players and empower them to create successful organizations.

But the theory is that, knowing how to build this apparatus, it couldn't build an organization? That is not plausible. What is plausible is that a missile expert familiar with the rough organization of how to get to missiles and military aviation knew which parts of the organization need to be present. So primarily this was a knowledge transfer situation.

It would be much more convincing if a historical analysis landed on the idea that the Chinese were somehow blocked on progress on the technology. For instance, India received no Qian Xuesen and was a similarly positioned nation with similar aspirations, and had the disadvantage of reduced Soviet technology transfer. So we know from their success what the worst-case for indigenous development without a US-trained specialist (esp. one familiar in military organization development) is. Roughly 10 years across all, a couple of years for aviation, a decade plus for missile tech.

Having accelerated Chinese missile technology one decade (in hindsight), do we consider that trade reasonable? Integrating him after imprisonment would surely have been hard. So the counterfactual is that we don't do the prisoner exchange and find a way to hold him indefinitely? It seems to me that judging based on the outcome is likely saying one should have guessed heads because the coin landed heads and that this is a great blunder.

by arjie

5/21/2026 at 1:42:45 AM

> But that is only a blunder if the counterfactual is that China would not have achieved that military aviation as fast. The picture drawn is that the Chinese had a sophisticated and intelligent organizational apparatus that knew to get key players and empower them to create successful organizations.

I think the potential difference here is that the contemporary Chinese government was still pretty new at the time; they only fully took power in 1949, a year before his house arrest started and five years before they were able to have him begin working for them. It isn't that implausible to me that a government less than a decade old might not have a consensus around how to plan longer-term projects, and I don't think that knowing who the right person for a job is can be equated to the knowledge to do the job itself. My reading of the article is an argument that the national security policy of the US was not compatible with the type of planning that would be needed for technological superiority in the long term; they're saying that while they might be aligned for a short time due to the priorities during a time of outright war, in the long term the priorities of the way the US strives for national security change much more due to immediate circumstances.

> Integrating him after imprisonment would surely have been hard. So the counterfactual is that we don't do the prisoner exchange and find a way to hold him indefinitely?

I'm realizing now that I think I might have been conflating this article with another one that seems to have been flagged and the comments moved here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207251), which made the argument that the imprisonment was the unsalvageable mistake. (I guess it was LLM generated? I've suspected for a while that I'd probably be bad at recognizing whether content is "real" or not, so I'm not totally surprised that it wasn't obvious to me when I read it before anyone had flagged or commented on it).

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 4:03:50 AM

People claimed I was writing a propaganda piece apparently, when I note that this was a failure of losing empiricism and pragmatism that America had, as a philosophy since 1878 that propagated into the New Deal, because of the Soviet threat.

by danieltanfh95

5/21/2026 at 2:02:29 PM

I admit that I did consider whether that was a possibility when reading it, but I also felt like the analysis you presented was straightforward enough for people to be able to discuss on its own merits rather than needing to reflexively dismiss it. It didn't strike me at all as being in bad faith even if I'm still not totally sure how much I agree with it or not, and I certainly found it more thought-provoking than the generic article that this thread is attached to now, so I was somewhat disappointed to see it was flagged. I feel like HN should be fully capable of having a rationale discussion or just choosing not to engage with the original article rather than needing to shuffle everything over because of fears that the other one was too pro-China.

I guess the irony is that dismissing points of view about how things could be improved here because they aren't sufficiently dogmatic is pretty much exactly what I understood the thesis of your article to be.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 4:01:50 AM

The counterfactual was not to imprison him in the first place. That was what the orignal article : https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strat... is about.

Qian was widely considered as a "strategic" scientist in China. The knowledge he had counteracted the Soviet political apparatus, and was enough to propel China into superpower status in less than a hundred years.

by danieltanfh95

5/20/2026 at 4:45:35 PM

Definitely a famous story that gets retold and almost mythologized in China. When I taught over there, several different middle school students independently told me about this story.

by ailun

5/20/2026 at 7:56:54 PM

It should be a cautionary tale.

How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?

by 999900000999

5/20/2026 at 9:22:04 PM

I had a friend working at a startup I interned at who had come over on a student visa, gotten a temporary visa to work, but then eventually was not able to keep it and ended up moving to Canada and working there. It's never made sense to me why we'd want to kick people out after they've received education here; if anything, it would make more sense to require them to work here for a bit after (although I'd also probably be opposed to that because I generally just don't like treating people as cogs in a working machine).

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 8:21:12 PM

Immigration views tend to track who the immigrants seemingly threaten, so sites like HN tend to have the views about H1-Bs[0] that working-class people have about working-class immigrants (illegal or otherwise).

It'll be interesting to see if America can reverse this trend. Our ability to be a sink for global talent has been a massive boost to America's success. The funny thing is that there will be no substitute should America falter. The rising powers are not as immigrant friendly. There are as many foreigners in tiny Taiwan as in mighty China. What might well happen is that the particular combination of human agglomeration, relatively free markets, and a diverse society might just be lost and with it all the human productivity that came with it.

0: "do we really need them?" "aren't locals enough?" "we should train locals" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

by arjie

5/20/2026 at 9:37:26 PM

> It's never made sense to me why we'd want to kick people out after they've received education here;

That was (probably) never anyone's intention, American representative democracy is just schizophrenic by design. For the same reason the US has never faithfully abided by any treaty, laws and policies rarely end up functioning as intended after the political process.

by t-3

5/21/2026 at 1:46:35 AM

I don't disagree, although I've also found that I'm often surprised by what people actually think is reasonable policy, and immigration in particular seems to evoke opinions that seem absurd to me but are held by a large enough number of people that I have trouble fathoming.

by saghm

5/20/2026 at 8:52:46 PM

Or not coming here at all.

by macintux

5/20/2026 at 9:59:32 PM

Is China a great place to flee to for victims of xenophobia? A new safe haven?

by dude250711

5/20/2026 at 10:23:11 PM

Going back home makes sense in this particular story.

Keep in mind China has a different founding myth.

America is the so called country of immigrants.

by 999900000999

5/20/2026 at 11:48:05 PM

Kind of a non-issue when we won't let them stay. I know several Chinese nationals who: received STEM degrees in the US, really wanted to stay, but struggled to get a visa and ended up back in China.

by aidenn0

5/21/2026 at 5:23:24 AM

If you are Han, and born there? Yes, absolutely.

by dghlsakjg

5/21/2026 at 11:38:48 AM

By being deported, Qian Xuesen was thrust into an environment where he was able to succeed.

Had he been allowed to stay in the US, he may have had a brilliant career as a scientist, but it is very unlikely that he would have ever been given the resources and leadership responsibilities to have an equivalent impact on US aerospace and defense programs.

by Merrill

5/21/2026 at 12:38:20 AM

Not comparable, but the story of Gerald Bull is interesting. I read Frederick Forsyth's The Fist of God in the late 90s and only came to know about Bull and Project Babylon when I chanced upon the Wikipedia article on the subject.

by sieve

5/21/2026 at 1:58:30 AM

Love that guy - you've truly lived if you can get a line like this on your wiki: "Given Bull's past ventures, it has been speculated that besides Iran or Israel, the CIA; MI6; or the Chilean, Syrian, Iraqi, or South African government could have been behind his assassination."

by acc_297

5/21/2026 at 11:08:42 AM

If Qian made China 1% stronger, he was a great man. But does a <1% difference actually change anything?

by field_reader

5/20/2026 at 9:08:05 PM

Also Erdal Arikan. Turkish researcher denied a Green Card, so he was invited by the Chinese Govt. to capitalize on his research there instead. His work led to 5G technology.

by fakedang

5/20/2026 at 7:58:21 PM

Fun fact;In 1992 ,he advised Chinese leaders to focus on new energy vehicles as they would never catch up on ice. Looks like his counsel was taken as we can see the results today.

by MaxPock

5/20/2026 at 8:06:59 PM

Also fun fact, he advised Mao on agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, using rough estimates of photosynthetic efficiency to calculate potential crop yields. Those estimates were far removed from reality and indirectly contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, while other countries were benefiting from the success of the Green Revolution.

by bwv848

5/20/2026 at 9:07:00 PM

He didn't advise Mao directly. He published his "rough estimate" in China Youth Daily on June 16, 1958 as 《粮食亩产量会有多少？》. It's possible, though unconfirmed, that Mao (or his secretary) read this article and was influenced. But yeah, the math was bad and off by an order of magnitude. Even geniuses can't be right all the time and I guess he was quite irresponsible for publishing a hand-wavy back-of-the-envelope estimate like that.

by porphyra

5/20/2026 at 9:36:23 PM

Qian gave a talk about agriculture at the 6th Supreme State Conference in 1956, Mao directly talked to Qian about his article in 1958 '你在青年报上写的那篇文章我看了，陆定一同志很热心，到处帮你介绍。你在那个时候敢于说四万斤的数字，不错啊。你是学力学的，学力学而谈农业，你又是个农学家。', while later Qian admitted it was theoretically only and he miscalculated, he probably did it out of modesty and he didn't say shit about his impact on tens of millions of death whatsoever. In fact, Mao's secretary at the time was Li Rui, who was a pragmatist and quite liberal during his lifetime. He questioned Mao's sanity, and Mao just blamed Qian.

by bwv848

5/20/2026 at 9:41:38 PM

Thanks for the correction. That sucks then. Dude should have stayed in his lane making rockets instead of commenting on agriculture.

by porphyra

5/20/2026 at 11:16:52 PM

It's a compelling example of the common phenomenon where a certified genius in one field makes a blunder by attempting to reason from first principles to analyze a problem in another field. Not that such things never work; there are success stories too, but it's not guaranteed.

by defen

5/20/2026 at 10:14:02 PM

This is probably just him trying to survive Mao's insanity

by wagwang

5/21/2026 at 7:29:32 AM

Wrong. Mao didn’t have full control at the time. Before the Lushan Conference in 1959, China had a system of collective leadership, and Mao more or less respected it. Mao was always insane, even before the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference and the Cultural Revolution, but Qian was definitely not under pressure, he simply enjoyed his alliance with Mao so much that his last words were: ‘毛泽东思想活着，中国就永远年轻’ (‘As long as Maoism lives, China will remain forever young.’)

by bwv848

5/20/2026 at 8:14:56 PM

Central planning and heterogeneous large scale distributed agriculture don't mix.

by contingencies

5/20/2026 at 9:07:40 PM

That seems like an oversimplification of what happened to Soviet Russia and China under Mao.

by fragmede

5/20/2026 at 9:40:30 PM

I grew up in USSR, and wrt agriculture it isnt oversimplification, it is exactly how it was there. It was the key factor resulting in the food shortages, and that was a major factor in the USSR collapse.

by trhway

5/20/2026 at 8:33:52 PM

Central planning and agriculture don't mix.

by worik

5/21/2026 at 12:40:30 PM

China seems to be doing OK these days, are they no longer planning centrally?

by BigTTYGothGF

5/21/2026 at 12:35:11 AM

In his later years (late 1980s), he also advocated for AI and human superpower research.

The superpower thing turned out to be pseudoscience later. As a result of being lumped together, for a long period of time, AI was regarded as pseudoscience in China as well.

Although to be fair, during the same period, the US and the USSR were researching superpowers as well.

by crvdgc

5/21/2026 at 12:42:11 AM

The article unfortunately neglects most of backstory in favor of a ‘unique genius came out of nowhere’ narrative. Qian was a member of the Caltech Suicide Squad that did things like build the WAC Corporal sounding rocket, which carried 25 lbs of scientific instrumentation to ~20 miles. That was headed by Frank Malina, under the equally remarkable Theodore von Kármán, and Qian was a prominent member.

That was only made possible by the foundation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech (GALCIT), which got its funding from the U.S. Army Air Corps for jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) units - so it was a contract research lab. The specific funding train came from Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold of the Air Corps, who wanted to use rockets to get heavy bombers off short Pacific runways. von Kármán’s role was larger than just GALCIT (and interestingly, was a Jewish-Hungarian who settled in the USA in 1930, a bit of a mirror of Qian’s trajectory).

The intersection of von Kármán and Qian Xuesen is highlighted in this fascinating and comprehensive collection of the program’s results as pdfs:

https://www.governmentattic.org/TwardNewHorizons.html

“The resulting multi-volume report, collectively titled: "Toward New Horizons," was hugely influential, even having been credited with leading to America's postwar airpower dominance. The report is widely cited, but references are largely to the introductory/summary volume, "Science, the Key to Air Supremacy”

“Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien [aka Qian Xuesen], principal author-editor of the entire report series, later after returning to The People's Republic of China, was the founder of China's ballistic missile programs and became known as the Father of Chinese Rocketry.”

Finally, without the Maoist government’s decision to devote massive state resources to a missile/space program, there would similarly have been no ground for Qian to cultivate in China.

Conclusion? The ‘great genius’ narratives of scientific and engineering history do contain a grain of truth (Qian published >50 papers many foundational) but are commonly oversold as examples of heroic individualism, presenting a rather distored lens on historical developments (and confusing many young students about how the world really works).

by photochemsyn

5/21/2026 at 12:54:16 PM

McCarthy, Trump & Reagan - same idiots who say a lot while causing damage that lasts decades.

by dzonga

5/20/2026 at 11:10:56 PM

I don't think he is a communist, he just believe in people like Mao and he's party.

The other thing is,as a Chinese person, apart from a very small minority who are receptive to Western propaganda and hold anti-Han/chinese/china sentiments, the vast majority will eventually embrace their strong sense of nationalism.

This also applies to Chen-Ning Yang.

by yanhangyhy

5/21/2026 at 8:33:05 AM

This is a bit offtopic, but why were those Mandarin sounds transliterated to those letters? Why not "Chian Shuesen"? It's not like Q as CH is intuitive at all.

by stavros

5/21/2026 at 11:09:59 AM

What you proposed is very close to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles

For an English speaker to be able to pronounce Chinese words, it would certainly be a better system. However, the main purpose of Pinyin is not that, but to indicate pronunciation for native Chinese speakers (most of whom had little exposure to English or other foreign languages when they learned pinyin, of course nowadays it might be different as kids start learning English at a much younger age) and to teach in schools. Using a Latin alphabet so that it's easier to integrate into international systems is a consideration, but never the main goal.

Besides, Chian Shuesen sounds closer but it's still not the same. Approximation has to happen somewhere, and there are already ch-/q- and sh-/x- distinction within pinyin.

by TwoFerMaggie

5/21/2026 at 12:43:26 PM

> It's not like Q as CH is intuitive at all.

One gets used to pinyin really quickly.

by BigTTYGothGF

5/21/2026 at 9:50:21 AM

q and ch both exist in pinyin, and have different sounds. The q sound requires placing the tip of the tongue on the teeth, and isn’t an initial consonant we have in English, so we don’t have a way to spell it.

by jph00

5/21/2026 at 11:01:26 AM

Fascinating, from the text i read:

"Qian’s political allegiance remains debated. Some argue he was always a committed Communist, while others see him as a scientist caught between two superpowers. His father had served in China’s Ministry of Education, and his early mentors were affiliated with the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) rather than the opposing Communists. Qian’s wife was the daughter of Jiang Baili, a high-ranking official of the KMT and KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek’s military adviser..."

So until today, we cannot rule out if he was indeed a committed Communist or not?

by pelasaco

5/20/2026 at 10:02:20 PM

I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative.

From Wikipedia

By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist

This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46]

This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.

by LAC-Tech

5/21/2026 at 12:52:05 AM

The FBI's practice of tracking "suspected communists" literally comes from the Red Scare. The McCarthyist era, which you seem to be calling "The Red Scare", is known as "The Second Red Scare". The First Red Scare followed the October Revolution pretty much immediately, and is the condition under which the FBI started surveiling suspected communists in 1919.

When Qian was asked to testify against Sidney Weinbaum, it was during the Second Red Scare.

All of this is absolutely tied up with those moral panics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare

by isityettime

5/21/2026 at 4:03:33 AM

There were a large number of actual, convicted communist spies at high levels in the 1940s and 50s. Soviet penetration was massive. The Manhattan Project, State Department, Intelligence Agencies... this was around the time the US had an arms embargo against the Republic of China while the USSR supplied the Chinese Communists with weapons captured from the Japanese in Manchuria.

This revisionism that it was all just paranoid weirdo (McCarthy) harassing innocent people is a very common trope, but an a-historical one.

by LAC-Tech

5/20/2026 at 10:53:05 PM

Every other intellectual and artist was a communist or socialist back then, but not in any way that seriously threatened the state. They all happily worked on the bomb, after all.

by platinumrad

5/20/2026 at 11:31:05 PM

I don't claim to be an expert on this case.

But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.

by LAC-Tech

5/20/2026 at 11:40:11 PM

It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.

The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.

Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.

by xbar

5/21/2026 at 4:21:13 AM

The US literally had a communist agent at Yalta who co-founded the UN.

To dismiss this whole period as just a "Red Scare" is kind of ridiculous considering how much actual communist infiltration there was.

We won't even talk about FDR's diplomat travelling to the USSR and giving Stalin a kiss in the 30s...

by LAC-Tech

5/21/2026 at 1:04:34 AM

I mean there's a reason why USSR got to develop nuclear bomb so quickly.

by mcmoor

5/20/2026 at 3:16:13 PM

Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.

by feverzsj

5/21/2026 at 7:05:29 AM

> contacting ccp since 1930s

CCP in 30s was just some ragtags in inner Yan'an

by eunos

5/20/2026 at 8:09:11 PM

Any source for your claims?

by raincom

5/20/2026 at 8:08:45 PM

Being raised by KMT and switching to CCP via the US matches this general narrative. But perhaps 'pragmatist' is more appropriate than 'opportunist'. After all, there were only so many countries with a missile program and resources for someone who speaks Mandarin and English and had a family who didn't want to learn Russian. In the interpretations I've been given, Taiwan at that stage was a mess. I think he was probably deeply hurt by the purge and would have stayed in the US and contributed further if it wasn't for the tide of McCarthyist nationalism. The US in the current era definitely has similar tones, which I have personally encountered. This warning piece comes late and may fall on deaf ears.

by contingencies

5/21/2026 at 4:17:07 AM

Yes it's odd how this supposed "non-communist" first planned to flee to the Maoist Mainland when his security clearance was revoked, not the ROC in Taiwan, considering he had far more connections with the nationalists.

by LAC-Tech

5/20/2026 at 8:18:16 PM

Wernher von Braun didn't have a rival/opponent nation he could betray America to.

Qian Xuesen did and did.

by catigula

5/20/2026 at 9:06:11 PM

Did you forget that most of his colleagues worked with the USSR? Von Braun was just lucky that the US got to him and captured him first.

by fakedang

5/21/2026 at 12:44:03 AM

Dumb comment. Nazis were blood enemies of communists. They didn’t want to fight the Americans or even the British.

by catigula

5/21/2026 at 6:39:14 PM

And yet how many Nazi scientists advanced the Soviet nuclear and aerospace programmes willingly? How many former Nazis joined the Stasi? Hint hint, a fucking lot.

by fakedang