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 l…
Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#42Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#43An 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 indigen…
> 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 c…
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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#44That'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 l…
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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#45Definitely 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.
It should be a cautionary tale. How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#46From 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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#48Fun 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.
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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#49That'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 l…
> 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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be a cautionary tale. How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
Is China a great place to flee to for victims of xenophobia? A new safe haven?
Keep in mind China has a different founding myth.
America is the so called country of immigrants.