Hacker News

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.

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_...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Qian Xuesen did and did.