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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)

#81

Post by danieltanfh95 »

arjie wrote: post #43
saghm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 dr…

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.

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

#82

Post by LAC-Tech »

isityettime wrote: post #67
LAC-Tech wrote: post #46

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 F…

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 w…

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.

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

#83

Post by danieltanfh95 »

saghm wrote: post #70
arjie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

> 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.

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

#84

Post by LAC-Tech »

feverzsj wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by LAC-Tech »

xbar wrote: post #57
LAC-Tech wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't claim to be an expert on this case. But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.

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 meeti…

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...

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

#86

Post by bberkgaut »

vitus wrote: post #75
embedding-shape wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The more interesting the movie could be!

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

#87

Post by xp84 »

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_...

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.

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

#88

Post by dghlsakjg »

dude250711 wrote: post #45
999900000999 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

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

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

#89

Post by xp84 »

hitekker wrote: post #76
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/…

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.

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

#90

Post by fleroviumna »

hitekker wrote: post #76
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/…

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