Latest news with #QianXuesen
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Brain Drain: How Trump's Policies Could Wreck American Innovation for Generations
70 years ago, at the height of the Red Scare, the United States deported Qian Xuesen, a pioneering Chinese-born aerospace engineer. The government accused Qian of being a communist, which he denied. Back in China, Qian continued his work, becoming known as the father of Chinese rocketry and laying the foundations for the nation's missile and space programs. Former US Under Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball called Qian's deportation 'the stupidest thing this country ever did.' Now, the Tr
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Business Standard
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
US made a terrible mistake when it deported this Chinese rocket scientist
In 1950, though it didn't know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and MIT, he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America's first guided ballistic missiles. He was made a colonel in the US Air Force, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project and was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists. Dr Qian wanted the first man in space to be American — and was designing a rocket to make it happen. Then he was stopped short. At the height of his career, there came a knock at the door, and he was handcuffed in front of his wife and young son. Prosecutors would eventually clear Dr Qian of charges of sedition and espionage, but the United States deported him anyway — traded back to Communist Beijing in a swap for about a dozen American prisoners of war in 1955. The implications of that single deportation are staggering: Dr Qian returned to China and immediately persuaded Mao Zedong to put him to work building a modern weapons program. By the decade's end, China tested its first missile. By 1980, it could rain them down on California or Moscow with equal ease. Dr Qian wasn't just rightly christened the father of China's missile and space programs; he set in motion the technological revolution that turned China into a superpower. His story has been top of mind for me (I've been working on a biographical book project on him for several years now) as we've watched the Trump administration ruthlessly target foreign students and researchers. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned up the pressure, announcing that the administration would work to 'aggressively revoke' visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in 'critical fields.' There are some one million foreign students in the United States — more than 250,000 of them Chinese. Dr Qian's deportation should serve as an important cautionary tale. It proved an American misstep, fueled by xenophobia, that would forever alter the global balance of power. In an echo of the current moment, he became a target of the hysteria around Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare because he was a Chinese national and a scientist. He was humiliated when his security clearance was revoked. The price paid for shunning Dr Qian has been dear. Not only did the United States miss a chance to leapfrog the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight; it gave China the one resource it lacked to challenge American dominance in Asia: significant scientific prowess. In addition to closing that gap, his return to China ushered in generations of homegrown Chinese scientific breakthroughs. To this day, Washington spends billions of dollars on a nuclear umbrella shielding our Pacific allies from his technical achievements. When asked about America's deportation of Dr Qian, the former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball said, 'It was the stupidest thing this country ever did.' Dr Qian came to the United States as a young man of 23. He benefited from a scholarship that now seems to represent a vanished mind-set: the idea that international educational exchange would promote American values and foster world peace. Edmund James, the American representative in Beijing, set up the fund that brought Dr Qian and other students like him to the United States. 'The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation,' Dr James wrote to President Teddy Roosevelt, 'will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.' By the 1960s, three-quarters of China's 200 most eminent scientists, including future Nobel Prize winners, had been trained in America, thanks to Dr James. In California, Dr Qian joined up with a group of other promising young scientists who called themselves the Suicide Squad, after at least one of their early experiments blew up a campus lab. At an annual meeting of engineers, two of the squad members announced they had worked out how to create a rocket capable of flying 1,000 miles vertically above the earth's surface. Soon they acquired a more official name: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1949, Dr Qian was chosen to lead the laboratory, which by then was the precursor to NASA. He not only wanted to help the United States win the space race, but he also unveiled plans to use rockets in air travel to allow passengers to get from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour. Was Dr Qian a spy? Was he a Communist? There was no convincing evidence of either, but it's unclear whether the American government ever cared. Protests by top defense officials and academics, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with Dr Qian on the Manhattan Project, went unheeded. After five years under house arrest, Dr Qian was begging the Chinese government to help him escape the United States. State Department documents, now declassified, suggest that Dr Qian had become a highly undervalued pawn in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, traded back to China for US airmen. The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, speaking triumphantly about the negotiations, said: 'We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.' Dr Qian never returned to the United States and served the rest of his life as a celebrated leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He is seen as a national hero, too, with a museum built to honor his accomplishments. Most of his remarks in his later years were either technical documents or party propaganda against America. In 1966, however, one of his former Caltech colleagues received a postcard decorated with a traditional Chinese drawing of flowers and postmarked in Beijing. On it Dr Qian had written simply, 'This is a flower that blooms in adversity.' Mr. Rubio's announcement, although short on details, has surely set off waves of anxiety among international students and their colleagues at research universities, as schools and laboratories brace themselves for further disruption. Something larger has been lost, though: America once saw educating the strivers of the world as a way to enhance and strengthen our nation. It was a strategic advantage that so many of the best and brightest thinkers, scientists and leaders wanted to study here and to be exposed to American democracy and culture. Dr Qian's achievements on behalf of China demonstrate the risk of giving up that advantage and the potential dark side of alienating — rather than welcoming — the world's talent. There's always the chance that it will someday be used against us.
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The U.S. Made a Terrible Mistake When It Deported This Scientist
In 1950, though it didn't know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and M.I.T., he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America's first guided ballistic missiles. He was made a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project and was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists. Dr. Qian wanted the first man in space to be American — and was designing a rocket to make it happen. Then he was stopped short. At the height of his career, there came a knock at the door, and he was handcuffed in front of his wife and young son. Prosecutors would eventually clear Dr. Qian of charges of sedition and espionage, but the United States deported him anyway — traded back to Communist Beijing in a swap for about a dozen American prisoners of war in 1955. The implications of that single deportation are staggering: Dr. Qian returned to China and immediately persuaded Mao Zedong to put him to work building a modern weapons program. By the decade's end, China tested its first missile. By 1980, it could rain them down on California or Moscow with equal ease. Dr. Qian wasn't just rightly christened the father of China's missile and space programs; he set in motion the technological revolution that turned China into a superpower. His story has been top of mind for me (I've been working on a biographical book project on him for several years now) as we've watched the Trump administration ruthlessly target foreign students and researchers. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned up the pressure, announcing that the administration would work to 'aggressively revoke' visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in 'critical fields.' There are some one million foreign students in the United States — more than 250,000 of them Chinese. Dr. Qian's deportation should serve as an important cautionary tale. It proved an American misstep, fueled by xenophobia, that would forever alter the global balance of power. In an echo of the current moment, he became a target of the hysteria around Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare because he was a Chinese national and a scientist. He was humiliated when his security clearance was revoked. The price paid for shunning Dr. Qian has been dear. Not only did the United States miss a chance to leapfrog the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight; it gave China the one resource it lacked to challenge American dominance in Asia: significant scientific prowess. In addition to closing that gap, his return to China ushered in generations of homegrown Chinese scientific breakthroughs. To this day, Washington spends billions of dollars on a nuclear umbrella shielding our Pacific allies from his technical achievements. When asked about America's deportation of Dr. Qian, the former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball said, 'It was the stupidest thing this country ever did.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Deportation Whack-a-Mole for International Students
Editor's note: In this Future View, students discuss deportation policies. Next we'll ask: 'What personal or cultural factors are influencing the surge of young people from the U.S., France and the U.K. converting to Catholicism on college campuses?' Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words by May 12. The best responses will be published Tuesday night. Serve This Country When the Nazis exiled their physicists, America split the atom. When the U.S. kicked out Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Qian Xuesen during the Second Red Scare, China got the father of its space program. Now, in the era of drone swarms and large language models, we're debating whether to deport some drama-club jihadists for chanting on campus lawns—as if a handful of overgrown toddlers with rhyming signs could topple the republic that gave the world the internet. We used to absorb dissidents and turn them into weapons. Now, we mistake tantrums for treason. These students aren't spies or saboteurs. They're ballast—bored narcissists—elevated only by our panic. While free speech is free, visas aren't. If they can't serve this country, why are they here? Foreign-born founders started 55% of America's billion-dollar startups. More than 70% of graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science are international. We can afford to jail traitors. We can afford to ignore clout-chasing protesters. What we can't afford is to scare off entrepreneurs and builders. Half of Silicon Valley has a foreign accent and a visa history. Shut that down, and you don't get patriotism. You get decay, drift and decline. Real regimes don't fear protest; they fear silence—because that means the smart people have already left. —Allen Rubin, University of Austin, computer science The U.S. Can Do It Current deportation policies for international students are not only fair but essential for maintaining national security and the integrity of our immigration system. By accepting U.S. visas, students agree to follow specific rules. If they break those terms—through criminal behavior, overstaying, unauthorized work or activities harmful to national interests—they forfeit their right to remain and should be swiftly removed. Some may argue that current deportation policies for international students infringe on First and Fifth Amendment protections, but this overlooks both the limited rights of noncitizens and the government's broad authority in immigration matters. Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei (1953) affirmed the executive's power to detain and expel foreign nationals without hearings, while Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. (1893) established deportation as a sovereign administrative act not requiring judicial due process. Moreover, the government's use of immigration laws to deport aliens who undermine American foreign policy and national security remains well within its constitutional authority. Deportation isn't about suppressing dissent; it's about enforcing agreed-on legal standards. Upholding those standards maintains fairness for those who follow the rules and protects the credibility of our immigration system. The Trump administration is simply enforcing laws that prior Democratic administrations overlooked. —Santhosh Nadarajah, Princeton University, molecular biology An American Brain Drain Proposed legislation aimed at increasing scrutiny of international research ties, cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, and threats to deport foreign-born students have strained global collaboration during the past few months. The U.S. is quietly dismantling the academic engine that drives its global leadership. America's scientific dominance is built on decades of investment and international collaboration. In my neuroscience laboratory, my postdoctorate mentor, an internationally-trained Alzheimer's expert with major publications in the scientific journal Neuron, left the U.S. this past November in fear of immigration scrutiny despite her legal status. Her exit wasn't only a personal loss; it was a blow to American science. Schools are meant to be sanctuaries for discovery, not surveillance. If we keep driving out the minds behind great scientific breakthroughs, which country will lead the next crisis response? —Inaam Zafar, University of California, Riverside, neuroscience Don't Discriminate If an international student comes to the U.S. not to get an education but to operate as a political agitator and undermine campus safety, then it's fair for the government to exercise discretion in whether or not that person has a right to stay. Many of the worst offenders in recent protests have sought to exploit their student visas to advocate against U.S. foreign policy. They forget that it is a privilege, not a right, to study in America. There should be consequences for students who call for the erasure of the Jewish people. The chant 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is considered antisemitic under the definition produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has recently been adopted by universities such as Harvard. Many students who have been taken into ICE custody have shown support for U.S designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah and participated in hateful and disruptive campus protests. To engage in debate and activism is fine—but advocating discrimination is anathema to American values, which is exactly what these protesters have been doing. Advertisement —Becky Flanagan, New York University, real estate and architecture Come, Study and Stay In 1970 the U.S. hosted roughly 36% of the global international student population. By 1995 that number shrank to 30%. In 2025 America is on track to host less than 16%. International students help the U.S. by bringing consumption power, innovation, perspective and culture. America needs these students to study and stay in America. Foreign-born women are projected to have roughly a 20% higher fertility rate than women born in the U.S. Foreign-born graduates of U.S. colleges start companies, buy homes and invest in the American economy. They also earn more than the average American. The U.S. has remained the most competitive nation in the world by attracting brilliant minds. Albert Einstein, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk and Joseph Pulitzer are jexamples. We better pray the next generation of geniuses make the same selection. —James W. Knopf, University of Washington, construction management Click here to submit a response to next week's Future View.
