Earlier quoted context omitted.
Central planning and heterogeneous large scale distributed agriculture don't mix.
Central planning and agriculture don't mix.
China seems to be doing OK these days, are they no longer planning centrally?
Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#112This 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.
> It's not like Q as CH is intuitive at all.
One gets used to pinyin really quickly.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ahh, I see, so it's not "Chian", it's "Tsian"?
'q' is alveolar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_consonant. In Wade-Giles it would be "Ch'ian".
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#114McCarthy, Trump & Reagan - same idiots who say a lot while causing damage that lasts decades.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#115The 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_...
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/…
Crazy even Garry Tan can't write his own opinion blogs anymore
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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; th…
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.
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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#117That'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.
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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#118That'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…
> 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.
The Americans didn't make a movie about him, because it's too humiliating.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#119The 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_...
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
It’s too early for xenophobic christo-fascist boogeyman narratives, man.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably just him trying to survive Mao's insanity
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 Mao…
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