Qian Xuesen
Bios
From the Wikipedia:
"In 1955, Qian returned to China as part of an agreement for the release of American prisoners in China, and he was welcomed as a hero. He soon took charge of the country's missile and satellite programs. In October 1956, Qian became the director of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, tasked with ballistic missile and nuclear weapons development.
Qian's reputation as a prominent scientist who was caught up in the Red Scare in the United States gave him considerable influence during the Mao era and afterward. Qian eventually rose through Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ranks to become a Central Committee member. He became associated with the China's Space Program – From Conception to Manned Spaceflight initiative.
Qian survived both the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution by adapting to the shifting political climate in China. For example, in 1958, Qian wrote an article with “scientific” support of the Great Leap Forward.
In 1956, Qian and mathematician Xu Guozhi established China's first operations research group; control theory was one of the group's major research areas. Qian was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1957, a lifelong honor granted to Chinese scientists who had made significant advancements in their field. He organized scientific seminars and dedicated some of his time to training successors for his positions. In 1960, the operations research group he had established with Xu became part of the operations research lab at the Mathematics Institute of CAS.
He was heavily involved in the establishment of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1958 and served as the Chairman of the Department of Modern Mechanics of the university for a number of years. In his teaching, Qian emphasized the importance of conducting systemic literature reviews as a preliminary step before embarking on research projects.
In 1960, Qian founded the Combat Research Department at the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defence. It was China's first military operations research centre.
In 1962, Qian recruited Song Jian and Guan Zhaozhi to establish China's first cybernetics laboratory with him.
According to Qian, at a meeting in 1964, “suddenly Chairman Mao asked me if it was possible to shoot down a missile, I replied that it should be possible.” In 1966, China formally began to develop a missile interceptor system.
In 1969, Qian was one of a group of scientists who spoke with Australian journalist Francis James, describing China's first seven nuclear tests and details of a gaseous diffusion plant near Lanzhou.
Outside of rocketry, Qian had a presence in numerous areas of study. He was among the creators of systematics, and made contributions to science and technology systems, somatic science, engineering science, military science, social science, the natural sciences, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and education. His advancements in the concepts, theories, and methods of the system science field included studying the open complex giant system. Additionally, he helped establish the Chinese school of complexity science. His research advanced the discipline of engineering cybernetics, which emphasized the importance of design principles in practical engineering.
In 1978–1979, Qian and his coauthors published a series of influential research papers contending for the legitimacy and superiority of systems engineering as a method for managing complex entities from factories to states.
In 1979, Qian was awarded Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award for his achievements. Qian eventually received his award from Caltech, and with the help of his friend Frank Marble, brought it to his home in a widely covered ceremony. Furthermore, in the early 1990s, the filing cabinets containing Qian's research work were offered to him by Caltech.
In 1980, Qian proposed research into noetic science. Qian envisioned it as a discipline covering all topics required to develop an understanding of how to formalize human thinking for digital computers and computational systems, drawing together neuropsychology, linguistics, philology, logic, and the development of algorithms.
During the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, Qian was among those who criticized the science fiction genre, contending that it promoted irrational and unscientific thinking.
From the 1980s onward, Qian advocated the scientific investigation of traditional Chinese medicine, qigong, and the pseudoscientific concept of “special human body functions”. He particularly encouraged scientists to accumulate observational data on qigong so that “future scientific theories could be established”.
In Qian's view, China should take a retaliatory nuclear posture as a form of deterrence. He stated in 1986, “We must have a certain number, or what is called a minimum nuclear counterattack capability. Of course, these strategic weapons cannot be eliminated by an adversary, their ability to survive must be high, their reaction must be quick, their penetration capability must be strong.”
As vice chairman for the Science and Technology Committee of the Commission for Science, Technology, and Industry (COSTIND) in 1989, Qian contended that Western reports predicting a post-nuclear weapon era following the end of the Cold War were “deceiving people, they are all false.” Qian stated, “Even if nuclear weapons were useless, would you ask the United States and the Soviets if it is ok to destroy all of their nuclear weapons? It is not at all the case that nuclear weapons are now useless, their utility is now in deterrence.” In a 1992 COSTIND speech, he stated regarding China's nuclear deterrence, “[O]f course, we do not need to do this on a large scale, but if you do not have [these weapons], people want to coerce you and bully you.”
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, he denounced the demonstrators as “evil elements” and described dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi as “the scum of the nation”.
* Later life
Qian retired in 1991 and lived quietly in Beijing, refusing to speak to Westerners.
Qian was invited to visit the U.S. by the AIAA after the normalization of relations between the two countries, but he refused the invitation, having wanted a formal apology for his detention. In a reminiscence published in 2002, Frank Marble stated that he believed Qian had “lost faith in the American government” but that he had “always had very warm feelings for the American people.” Despite this, Qian approved the decision of both his children, US citizens by birth, to return to the US to study.
The Chinese government launched its manned space program in 1992, reportedly with some help from Russia. Qian's research was used as the basis for the Long March rocket, which successfully launched the Shenzhou 5 mission in October 2003. The elderly Qian was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed.
In 2008, he was named Aviation Week & Space Technology Person of the Year. The recognition was not intended as an honor, but was given to the person judged to have had the greatest impact on aviation in the past year. That year, China Central Television named Qian as one of the eleven most inspiring people in China.
On October 31, 2009, Qian died at the age of 97 in Beijing from lung illness.
* Legacy in China
Qian is remembered for his foundational contributions to cybernetics in China and strategic weapons research. Among the contributions for which he is deemed a national science hero are: his foundational “Report on Building China's National Defense Aerospace Industry,” his leadership of large national defence weapons projects such as rocketry and ICBMs, the development of nuclear missile carriers, and initiating and advising the satellite and manned spaceflight projects.
Qian originated numerous Chinese terms related to missilery and the space program, including hangtian (航天, space flight) and daodan (导弹, guided missile).
After his retirement in 1991, Qian received numerous honorary titles in China and was highly praised in the press and by CCP officials, generating what was even called “Qian Xuesen fever”. Historian Ning Wang describes it as a Chinese propaganda campaign “to commend and eulogize” Qian's life. In 1989, the public movement “learn from Qian Xuesen” was officially launched by the Commission of Science for National Defence, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. Qian received the honorary title “State Scientist of Outstanding Contribution,” was awarded a “Medal for the First Class Heroic Model,” and was called by state leaders “the People's Scientist,” “National Hero,” and “the Pillar of the State.” For his 90th birthday in 2001, celebrations and praise were described as “comparable with that for Deng Xiaoping during 1992–97”.
Wang writes that the heroization of Qian served several purposes: highlighting his “deep engagement in China's national defence programmes,” his “allegiance to the Party and his well-articulated commitment to state ideology,” the rapid emergence of Chinese anti-Americanism, and the creation of a role model of a “party scientist.” Wang writes that in the 1990s, students “claimed to appreciate Qian's scientific accomplishments and the significance of science and technology, taking him as a model and swearing to study hard to be the ‘next Qian Xuesen’.”
Qian himself tried to avoid publicity and did not allow the writing of his biography until he received the title of “State Scientist.” During these heroization campaigns, multiple official and unofficial biographies were published. Official biographies were written by Qian's secretaries at CCP request. Wang Shouyun wrote A Biography of Qian Xuesen in 1991, and Tu Yuanji published another book in 2002. Unofficial biographies based on these works were published by Wang Wenhua, Qi Shuying, and Hu Shihong, among others.
Ning Wang summarizes the recurring portrayal found in these biographies as follows:
From these multifarious biographies we learn that Qian was a prodigy, a scientific genius from the outset. He was gifted with a golden mind in mathematics and displayed multiple talents at a young age – such as memorizing hundreds of poems when he was three – and was good at music and painting when growing up. At MIT and Caltech, Qian was brighter than his classmates and surprised professors with the intelligence of Chinese youth. He was particularly good at playing darts in childhood, which presaged his talent in rocketry. These narratives create a near-miraculous Qian, with a strong impression that he was not only a missile expert, but an all-rounder; not only a scientific giant, but a built-in communist revolutionary.
A Chinese film production, Hsue-shen Tsien, directed by Zhang Jianya and starring Chen Kun as Qian, was simultaneously released in Asia and North America on December 11, 2011, and later released in China in March 2012. Another biopic, Qian Xuesen, also directed by Zhang Jianya and starring Chen Kun, Zhang Yuqi and Zhang Tielin, was released in 2021. A retrofuturistic science fiction film, Qian Xuesen and the Yangtze River Computer, incorporates documentary footage of Qian to tell a fictional story about the creation of a supercomputer “of and for the masses.”