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.
> 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.
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.
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".
I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.
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?
> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy
Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.
True, given that he was a wartime administrator maybe they can just throw in a few battle scenes and military engagements to show the fruits of his labor. Start it framed as a WWII epic centered on a civilian, like The King's Speech, Darkest Hour, etc. Then it turns into Cold War intrigue. Maybe throw in some auto nostalgia for GM classic vehicles of the era.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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).
> It's never made sense to me why we'd want to kick people out after they've received education here;
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.
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.
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.
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.
Qian gave a talk about agriculture at the 6th Supreme State Conference in 1956, Mao directly talked to Qian about his article in 1958 '你在青年报上写的那篇文章我看了，陆定一同志很热心，到处帮你介绍。你在那个时候敢于说四万斤的数字，不错啊。你是学力学的，学力学而谈农业，你又是个农学家。', while later Qian admitted it was theoretically only and he miscalculated, he probably did it out of modesty and he didn't say shit about his impact on tens of millions of death whatsoever. In fact, Mao's secretary at the time was Li Rui, who was a pragmatist and quite liberal during his lifetime. He questioned Mao's sanity, and Mao just blamed Qian.
I grew up in USSR, and wrt agriculture it isnt oversimplification, it is exactly how it was there. It was the key factor resulting in the food shortages, and that was a major factor in the USSR collapse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And if Qian is truly comparable to Oppenheimer, well...
Putting Steve Jobs next to Charles Wilson is an insult to Wilson.
But they did make a biopic about a Charles Wilson and a war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)
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".
I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.
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?
> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy
Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.
True, given that he was a wartime administrator maybe they can just throw in a few battle scenes and military engagements to show the fruits of his labor. Start it framed as a WWII epic centered on a civilian, like The King's Speech, Darkest Hour, etc. Then it turns into Cold War intrigue. Maybe throw in some auto nostalgia for GM classic vehicles of the era.
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
> 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...
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_...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money”
How does this man not have a movie?
He has a TV show called Strange Angel, and it's pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Angel
[dead]
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.
It should be a cautionary tale.
How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
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).
> It's never made sense to me why we'd want to kick people out after they've received education here;
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.
Or not coming here at all.
Is China a great place to flee to for victims of xenophobia? A new safe haven?
Going back home makes sense in this particular story.
Keep in mind China has a different founding myth.
America is the so called country of immigrants.
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.
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.
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.
Qian gave a talk about agriculture at the 6th Supreme State Conference in 1956, Mao directly talked to Qian about his article in 1958 '你在青年报上写的那篇文章我看了，陆定一同志很热心，到处帮你介绍。你在那个时候敢于说四万斤的数字，不错啊。你是学力学的，学力学而谈农业，你又是个农学家。', while later Qian admitted it was theoretically only and he miscalculated, he probably did it out of modesty and he didn't say shit about his impact on tens of millions of death whatsoever. In fact, Mao's secretary at the time was Li Rui, who was a pragmatist and quite liberal during his lifetime. He questioned Mao's sanity, and Mao just blamed Qian.
Thanks for the correction. That sucks then. Dude should have stayed in his lane making rockets instead of commenting on agriculture.
This is probably just him trying to survive Mao's insanity
Central planning and heterogeneous large scale distributed agriculture don't mix.
That seems like an oversimplification of what happened to Soviet Russia and China under Mao.
I grew up in USSR, and wrt agriculture it isnt oversimplification, it is exactly how it was there. It was the key factor resulting in the food shortages, and that was a major factor in the USSR collapse.
Central planning and agriculture don't mix.
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.
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.
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.
Any source for your claims?
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.
Wernher von Braun didn't have a rival/opponent nation he could betray America to.
Qian Xuesen did and did.
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.