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.
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.
That's not what "Jobs" is about. It's the setting of a character-driven dramatization of Steve Job's life and his personality. You do not grow a company like Apple merely by dominating rooms with your personality, dropping oneliners and speaking in absolutes. There's a lot of actual work involved, the details of which would make for a movie rather boring to most audiences.
"Jobs" is a movie about Apple as much as "Inglourious Basterds" is a movie about the US military in WW2.
Of course a movie about Steve Jobs is inherently more marketable than one about Qian Xuesen. But one isn't inherently more boring than the other.
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.
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.
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".
Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)
But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?
A topic just needs a good writer to make the story interesting.
Well, that might have been a movie about Edward Teller, or possibly John von Neumann. Nobody is quite sure.
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...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_the_...
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...
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.
The Haigui waves for the last few years are quite huge
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.
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.
How does this man not have a movie?
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.
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.
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.
I think the potential difference here is that the contemporary Chinese government was still pretty new at the time; they only fully took power in 1949, a year before his house arrest started and five years before they were able to have him begin working for them. It isn't that implausible to me that a government less than a decade old might not have a consensus around how to plan longer-term projects, and I don't think that knowing who the right person for a job is can be equated to the knowledge to do the job itself. My reading of the article is an argument that the national security policy of the US was not compatible with the type of planning that would be needed for technological superiority in the long term; they're saying that while they might be aligned for a short time due to the priorities during a time of outright war, in the long term the priorities of the way the US strives for national security change much more due to immediate circumstances.
> 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?
I'm realizing now that I think I might have been conflating this article with another one that seems to have been flagged and the comments moved here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207251), which made the argument that the imprisonment was the unsalvageable mistake. (I guess it was LLM generated? I've suspected for a while that I'd probably be bad at recognizing whether content is "real" or not, so I'm not totally surprised that it wasn't obvious to me when I read it before anyone had flagged or commented on it).
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.
How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
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.
Keep in mind China has a different founding myth.
America is the so called country of immigrants.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rocket-scientist-g...
"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 that he was indeed a committed Communist?
https://player.instaread.co/player?article=the-missile-geniu...
EDIT: it's ai if anyone is curious
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.
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.
One gets used to pinyin really quickly.
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).
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.
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.
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.
This revisionism that it was all just paranoid weirdo (McCarthy) harassing innocent people is a very common trope, but an a-historical one.
But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.
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 meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.
CCP in 30s was just some ragtags in inner Yan'an
Qian Xuesen did and did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...
