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 • 2 months ago

198 124 2 months ago

usni.org

PaulHoule• 2 months ago

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.

madaxe_again• 2 months ago

“Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money”

How does this man not have a movie?

milleramp• 2 months ago

He has a TV show called Strange Angel, and it's pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Angel

feverzsj• 2 months ago

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.

contingencies2• 2 months ago

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.

raincom• 2 months ago

Any source for your claims?

LAC-Tech5• 2 months ago

Yes it's odd how this supposed "non-communist" first planned to flee to the Maoist Mainland when his security clearance was revoked, not the ROC in Taiwan, considering he had far more connections with the nationalists.

eunos3• 2 months ago

contacting ccp since 1930s

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

arjie3• 2 months ago

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.

saghm6• 2 months ago

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.

arjie3• 2 months ago

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.

ailun• 2 months ago

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.

9999000009993• 2 months ago

It should be a cautionary tale.

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

macintux• 2 months ago

Or not coming here at all.

saghm6• 2 months ago

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).

dude250711• 2 months ago

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

Animats4• 2 months ago

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.

jjk166• 2 months ago

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.

Apocryphon4• 2 months ago

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

vasco• 2 months ago

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

SideburnsOfDoom• 2 months ago

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...

Apocryphon4• 2 months ago

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

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

Animats4• 2 months ago

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".

gloryjulio• 2 months ago

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

dylan6042• 2 months ago

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.

grogenaut2• 2 months ago

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.

andsoitis• 2 months ago

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.

raincole2• 2 months ago

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.

KalMann• 2 months ago

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.

embedding-shape2• 2 months ago

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.

vitus• 2 months ago

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

photochemsyn2• 2 months ago

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.

xiii1408• 2 months ago

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.

dumb1224• 2 months ago

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.

Mashimo• 2 months ago

And one of them you can watch for free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDXrDXuDp9E

angry_octet• 2 months ago

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

dylan6042• 2 months ago

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.

grogenaut2• 2 months ago

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.

Animats4• 2 months ago

There are other movies about the Manhattan Project where Gen. Leslie Groves is the main character.[1] "Fat Man and Little Boy" is probably the most Groves-oriented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_the_Manha...

danieltanfh955• 2 months ago

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.

culi• 2 months ago

If anyone wants to listen to it without the paywall, it's just an iframe and you can literally just remove the "paywall" query param:

https://player.instaread.co/player?article=the-missile-geniu...

EDIT: it's ai if anyone is curious

MaxPock• 2 months ago

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.

bwv8483• 2 months ago

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.

contingencies2• 2 months ago

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

porphyra3• 2 months ago

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.

wagwang2• 2 months ago

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

crvdgc• 2 months ago

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.

catigula2• 2 months ago

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

Qian Xuesen did and did.

fakedang3• 2 months ago

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.

atrettel• 2 months ago

Von Braun was not "just lucky" to get captured by the US. He and his immediate staff took active steps to get captured by the Americans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...

catigula2• 2 months ago

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

porphyra3• 2 months ago

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_...

saghm6• 2 months ago

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.

danieltanfh955• 2 months ago

Exactly what I was trying to convey.

hitekker• 2 months ago

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.

xp842• 2 months ago

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.

verall2• 2 months ago

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

xp842• 2 months ago

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.

leonidasrup2• 2 months ago

China uses “non-traditional collectors”

https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/26/how-china-turns-m...

"Despite being one of the most populous countries in the world (1.4 billion), second only to India, China has an exceptionally low percentage of foreign nationals, at only 0.05%, as of 2023"

https://directhr.cn/pdf/Direct%20HR%20-%20Hello%20China%20or...

ekm2• 2 months ago

It is because it is populous that it does not have space for foreigners?

eunos3• 2 months ago

whereas relatively few people move to China

The Haigui waves for the last few years are quite huge

handle584• 2 months ago

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.

OrvalWintermute• 2 months ago

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

boston_clone• 2 months ago

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

fakedang3• 2 months ago

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.

LAC-Tech5• 2 months ago

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.

platinumrad• 2 months ago

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.

LAC-Tech5• 2 months ago

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

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

mcmoor• 2 months ago

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

isityettime• 2 months ago

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

LAC-Tech5• 2 months ago

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.

yanhangyhy• 2 months ago

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.

sieve• 2 months ago

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.

acc_297• 2 months ago

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."

photochemsyn2• 2 months ago

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).

salynchnew• 2 months ago

The Failure to Launch episode about Qian, the Cultural Revolution, and the brief inter-departmental war and attempted "coup" at the defense research institute where he worked... was quite something.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rocket-scientist-g...

tianshuo• 2 months ago

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.

stavros2• 2 months ago

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.

jph00• 2 months ago

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.

stavros2• 2 months ago

Ahh, I see, so it's not "Chian", it's "Tsian"?

TwoFerMaggie• 2 months ago

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.

BigTTYGothGF3• 2 months ago

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

One gets used to pinyin really quickly.

pelasaco• 2 months ago

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?

field_reader• 2 months ago

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

Merrill• 2 months ago

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.

dzonga• 2 months ago

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

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

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