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

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

#71

Post by saghm »

t-3 wrote: post #38
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

> 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.

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.

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

#72

Post by acc_297 »

sieve wrote: post #64

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.

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."

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

#73

Post by dylan604 »

Animats wrote: post #6

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…

> Hyman Rickoveronly 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.

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

#74

Post by dylan604 »

gloryjulio wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #6

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…

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

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.

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

#75

Post by vitus »

embedding-shape wrote: post #58
Animats wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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

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

#76

Post by hitekker »

porphyra wrote: post #27

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_...

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.

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

#77

Post by grogenaut »

Animats wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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

#78

Post by grogenaut »

gloryjulio wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #6

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…

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

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.

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

#79

Post by danieltanfh95 »

Animats wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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

#80

Post by danieltanfh95 »

saghm wrote: post #29
porphyra wrote: post #27

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_...

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.

Exactly what I was trying to convey.
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