Qian Xuesen dies at 98; Co-Founder of JPL and China's space program (2009)
latimes.com
latimes.com
The man was accused of being a Communist so harshly, he decided he'd rather actually be one and returned home regardless of the US refusal to grant him a visa to make it a round-trip.
What a waste.
re: http://books.google.com/books?id=NrG7fgW0ybEC&lpg=PA112&ots=...
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wind-Beyond-Theodore-Pathfinder/dp...
"The elderly Qian was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen
Whatever the politics, he was recognized by his peers as being a genius, a great rocket scientist, and that will be his legacy.
Let them go home? This issue has come up before. The Feds locked up H. S. Tsien [Qian Xuesen] back in the 50s because they thought he was pro-Chinese and would aid the Chinese rocket program. When they finally let him go, that’s exactly what he did.
There have been many cases in which key individuals have been allowed to go home and fight with their homies, due to chivalry or some other form of stupidity. in 1861, the Feds let many officers go home and fight for the Confederacy. Radomir Putnik, chief of the Serbian general staff, was taking the waters in Austria when the First World War broke out. They let him go home – were they ever sorry! Gernot Zippe, an Austrian POW in a Siberian camp, built a workable centrifuge for separating isotopes. Yet, to my lasting surprise, the Soviets let him go in 1956. He became the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear proliferation [along with Eisenhower - Atoms for Peace].
Either there are good reasons to believe he was a spy, or there are not. If there are not, then it's absolutely reasonable to say that he went to China because he was mistreated. If there are, then let's hear what they are, but "other Chinese people were spies" is not remotely a good reason.
It's non-naive reasoning based on the knowledge that yes, people do care about their own race and ethnicity and may have multiple loyalties, and the world doesn't work based on a simple 'you are 100% loyal to the country you are in' bit of reasoning.
Try engaging in less abuse and more probabilistic reasoning.
> Either there are good reasons to believe he was a spy, or there are not.
Either this is a false dichotomy, or it is not.
> If there are, then let's hear what they are, but "other Chinese people were spies" is not remotely a good reason.
Yes, it is. If other Chinese people were spies at above base-rates, then one will be more accurate in finding traitors by taking this into account.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/spy/leung/
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1990/Report-Stolen-Secrets-May-...
But then there are also cases like that of Wen Ho Lee where there was significant prosecutorial overreach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee
Four Chinese Espionage Investigations
Details of four investigations into suspected Chinese espionage over the past 20 years -- only one of which was prosecuted successfully -- revealing the complexities of such cases.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/spy/spies/four...
Edit: Corrected URL
"Sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists, Qian interviewed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. As the trade magazine Aviation Week put it in 2007, upon naming Qian its person of the year, "No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program."
No evidence was presented, he was never tried or convicted of being a spy. Imagine being at the height of your powers and than being wrongly accused of a crime, and for five years not being able to work with your peers. Science was the loser here.
Today's media reports on the moon landing refer to China's "military backed" space program. Duh. Instead of celebrating science, it's sad to see people rolling out little slurs and digs which are intended to discredit China and its achievements. I won't say it's racist but it sure looks like it.
But you did say it, and its ridiculous. How exactly is this supposed to be "racist"?
You don't think if Qian was Russian, and this was the 1950's that the government wouldn't have done something similar? The government can (and does) make decisions out of fear, and that's probably what was going on in this case.
yeah, more or less.
Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), technical director of Nazi Germany's missile program, became the United States' lead rocket engineer during the 1950s and 1960s
this guy was a former nazi, AND his home country of germany was a soviet satellite state, he seemed to escape suspicion. so this guy was a nazi and a communist, but he was all good. no problems here! gee. i wonder why.
there were also many soviet defectors that were never chased out of the country.
this is because he was chinese, plain and simple. doesn't look like us = not one of us. that was the thinking back in the day.
i wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that his accusors simply didn't think a chinese person could be smart enough to be a rocket scientist, either. people actually thought this way back in the 50s.
Success by Asians is smeared as being the result of industrial espionage, cheating or pure luck.
This drip feed of soft propaganda and sterotyping can't be good for society, when clearly many challenges remain:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-lorde-asian-...
So yeah, pretty much. From commie country + not white = commie.
Maybe you should reread your comment. He was 'a nazi and a communist'? That's quite a trick.
(von Braun and the other Nazis were trusted precisely because they were so virulently anti-Communist and there was, after all, western Germany, which I see you omit when you describe his 'home country' as being 'a soviet satellite state'...)
MANY nazis went on to become communists in east germany once the soviets moved in. they were, in fact, BOTH NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS.
i take it you've never really sat down and thought through some of your assumptions of the history of ww2 / europe / asia / america. i urge you to do so one day. it can be quite stimulating.
for example, did you know china was an ally in world war 2, while japan was an enemy?
crazy, i know.
I enjoy your condescension. It reminds me of why on Lesswrong, we say 'politics is the mindkiller'. Here we have a simple situation in which people with foreign ties often become spies and this justifies extra investigation, and people are going berserk and engaged in all sort of motivated reasoning.
> for example, did you know china was an ally in world war 2, while japan was an enemy?
Yes. I have more shocking information for you: Soviet Russia was an ally in WWII too.
Security is not a judicial procedure. Did we need to have a formal court trial with a smoking gun before we decided Dual_EC_DRBG was untrustworthy? Did we say 'yes, it's the NSA which is associated with treachery against cryptography and no, we can't prove it was backdoored, but let's assume good faith and keep using it'? No, of course not, because in security, that is an insane mindset.
> Did we need to have a formal court trial with a smoking gun before we decided Dual_EC_DRBG was untrustworthy?
No, because you can't try algorithms in a court of law. Algorithms don't have moral agency and can't act of their own accord. This analogy is unhelpful.
> Did we say 'yes, it's the NSA'...
The implication being that the NSA, an untrustworthy actor, created the PRNG and hence the PRNG is suspicious. That's reasonable. What's the analogy in the case of Qian? That he had been strongly linked or associated with activity or actors that were engaged in espionage? Fair enough. If you are claiming that his ancestry alone justifies as much suspicion in him as the provenance of Dual_EC_DRBG justifies suspicion in that PRNG...then we may have to agree to disagree.
No, it can escalate into judicial procedures if security agencies decide to make an example of someone, but it is not inherently judicial. When someone is denied clearance, it is not because they were put on trial by a jury of their peers and found guilty by majority vote after an extended trial with all the safeguards afforded citizens by the constitution.
> Algorithms don't have moral agency and can't act of their own accord. This analogy is unhelpful.
The analogy is apt. Both people and software are part of systems (have we learned nothing from social engineering?) and are attack surfaces.
> That he had been strongly linked or associated with activity or actors that were engaged in espionage? Fair enough. If you are claiming that his ancestry alone
Yes, that his loyalties may be divided because he came from China and not some obscure country like New Zealand. And let's not forget, it's not just his 'ancestry' - he wasn't born in Peoria Iowa. He was born and raised in China and came to the USA for higher education. That's much closer ties to China than 'ancestry'.
Any third option?
And that he dropped it: "He later changed course, however, and sought to return to China."
> On the other hand not going to China or working on Chinese rocket projects would have been ludicrous considering his ethnicity and field of expertise.
Why couldn't he go to Europe or any of the other countries in the world which are not China? And when he went to China, why did he work on what he did? It's possible to work in NASA rather than NSA.
> The question is why was he charged with communism (which is not a crime) without proof. Any charge without prior proof is over reach.
He apparently was not an American citizen (eg "Qian was born in the eastern city of Hangzhou, and in 1934 graduated from Jiaotong University in Shanghai, where he studied mechanical engineering."). You are applying the incorrect standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
white guys with european ancestry are the 2 worst spies in the history of the US.
did their loyalties lie where you "expected" them to lie?
I know statistics is hard, but seriously, this should be an obvious point. The relevant agencies are almost completely white especially in the era we're talking about; doesn't this imply that any spies are almost certainly going to be white and that more than 2 or 3 Chinese spies indicate that loyalties may be... divided? Look at the WP list, it's well beyond 2.
"we're the majority so you should expect to see more of us do X, the fact that isn't true proves that minority is bad."
this tired old argument and the convenient self-fulfilling prophecies it spawns can be used to justify anything. especially a persecution of any minority population for any activity whatsoever.
prime example: war on drugs.
let's not forget that investigations are run by people, with focused efforts on specific targets, for specific reasons. oftentimes investigators will go for the politically expedient target, the 'easy' target, or simply the targets that stick out when compared.
when you look at the ranks of falsely accused spies, what do you see?
just because more people are caught doing something does NOT mean that they are doing more of it in real life.
No, it can't. It is a precise argument based on fractions of the relevant population. One could refute my argument by simply presenting an estimate of the populations of white potential spies, white spies, Chinese potential spies, and showing the white spy % > Chinese spy %.
Instead, I get shit like your comment.
That's not my point. My point is that everyone here is enjoying their self-righteous anachronistic indignation & kibbitzing & moral superiority without even reaching the basic level of discussion of asking 'are Chinese immigrants more likely to be spying for China than regular scientists and so additional scrutiny warranted?' It's not that anyone has presented numbers or evidence - they don't even realize that they need to.
It's like if everyone was going around accusing me of racism and being an idiot and a Nazi and a Stormfront user (oh wait!); yes, maybe I have not presented a hard census of how many Chinese immigrants were working in sensitive programs and became suspected of being spies, but frankly, this discussion has much bigger problems than that.
So first, support your claim that Chinese spy more. Is it really that hard?
Second, even if that is true, the second part is not necessarily true. For example, white people are far more likely to be members of the KKK than any other race. Does that mean that white people deserve additional scrutiny because of it? No, because even though the relatively probability is much higher, the absolute probability is still negligible.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Chinese people spy at four times the average rate. If the average rate was 20% and the Chinese rate was 80%, yeah, clearly you should be checking into that pretty hard. On the other hand, if the average rate was 0.001% and the Chinese rate was 0.004%, you're just wasting resources if you think that justifies scrutiny of all Chinese.
is this something that your autistic world-filter can assign a number to? or do you just sit smugly at home with the knowledge that "yeah, those chinese people are probably spies. how come nobody sees it?"
it's the same old shit, dude. go back to stormfront.
Are not relevant to a discussion of national security...? Why don't you try looking at the right populations here?
> is this something that your autistic world-filter can assign a number to? ...it's the same old shit, dude. go back to stormfront.
I'm afraid I am not a member of Stormfront and so would not enjoy going back there.
So you're saying the US government should make white guys the subject of their prime suspicion? What kind of idiots concentrate on 1% while the other 99% of vulnerability gets free pass?
If I were a Chinese intelligence officer I'll first hire a bunch of white guys to do the dirty work. Apparently some people think they can trust you if you have a pale skin.
And they do devote the majority of their efforts to examining the overwhelming majority of their (white/black/hispanic) employees. But nevertheless, when they happen to be doing their checks of an immigrant from a hostile power, they should devote more effort than usual because it is more likely than the base rate...
> If I were a Chinese intelligence officer I'll first hire a bunch of white guys to do the dirty work.
Good luck.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for spy cases involving China:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operations...
There only seems to be one confirmed Chinese-American case in recent years - Chi Mak (and he was a naturalized citizen).
'recent years'? Why did you add this qualifier? That lists 8 different cases, and this is only what has gone public; by the nature of these things, you're only seeing the surface of the iceberg. (Does anyone seriously think that the US is not the top target of Chinese espionage and where it most wants agents?) Now, consider what fraction of the populace is Chinese-American, and what that implies...
And yes, this is only what has gone public. You explicitly said "turn out". Do you have information that the general public does not?
I said 'recent years', because does anyone consider espionage from the 80's to be relevant? I sure don't.
I don't know if you realize this, but most Chinese-Americans (at least from what I've seen) were either born in the US, from Taiwan, or fled the PRC (as in, they did not want to live in a country run by the PRC). Does anyone seriously think these people are going to be spies for the Chinese government?
No, they couldn't prove them to judicial satisfaction. That they were not shown to be guilty does not prove they were innocent.
> I said 'recent years', because does anyone consider espionage from the 80's to be relevant? I sure don't.
When you're considering rare events, yes, the 1980s are still relevant. Why would you exclude them? Did the Singularity happen in 1989 or are we on Mars or something?
> Does anyone seriously think these people are going to be spies for the Chinese government?
Does anyone seriously think that Chinese-Americans are all 100% loyal and are not a good recruiting ground for Chinese intelligence?
True, but you still can't count them as people who "turn out" to be passing secrets to the PRC.
> When you're considering rare events, yes, the 1980s are still relevant. Why would you exclude them? Did the Singularity happen in 1989 or are we on Mars or something?
If, as you contend, so many Chinese-Americans turn out to be passing secrets to the PRC, surely you can come up with more than 1 confirmed case within the past 30 years?
> Does anyone seriously think that Chinese-Americans are all 100% loyal and are not a good recruiting ground for Chinese intelligence?
Does anyone seriously think all Americans (even excluding Chinese-Americans) are all 100% loyal? I don't know why we would hold Chinese-Americans to a higher standard than the rest of the citizenry. I don't think Chinese-Americans are more likely to be spies in a statistically significant way.
And I actually don't think Chinese-Americans are a good recruiting ground for the PRC. As I mentioned, most Chinese-Americans I know (and I know a lot) were either born here, from Taiwan, or who worked hard to flee the PRC. They are generally apathetic or harbor resentment towards the PRC.
I think the PRC is far more likely to be trying to send people here than trying to recruit people that are already here.
See, that's an interesting claim. "Surely, if there were clandestine activities, we'd know about them and have solid proof about them."
Why not? These are people who were found to be extremely suspicious by the people in charge of finding spies. What is that, chopped liver?
> If, as you contend, so many Chinese-Americans turn out to be passing secrets to the PRC, surely you can come up with more than 1 confirmed case within the past 30 years?
How many Chinese-Americans are there working in these vulnerable positions? Is 1 confirmed case (with who knows how many scores of undetected or unconfirmable real cases) above or below the base rate for spying? Do you know? Shouldn't you know, before you pass judgement?
> I don't think Chinese-Americans are more likely to be spies in a statistically significant way.
You are, of course, as confident in this as it is possible to be in the absence of all evidence.
> I think the PRC is far more likely to be trying to send people here than trying to recruit people that are already here.
And your basis for this is...? Given the existence of common classifications like NOFORN, this would be self-defeating behavior.
Why can't you count people who have not been confirmed as being spies as people who have turned out to be spies? Isn't the answer to that self-evident?
Another way of looking at is this: every year, there are plenty of people who are acquitted of crimes they were prosecuted for. Can you say all those people turned out to have committed the crimes they were accused of, simply because the people in charge of finding criminals found them to be extremely suspicious?
> How many Chinese-Americans are there working in these vulnerable positions? Is 1 confirmed case (with who knows how many scores of undetected or unconfirmable real cases) above or below the base rate for spying? Do you know? Shouldn't you know, before you pass judgement?
For the purposes of this conversation, undetected and unconfirmed cases are irrelevant. I am solely responding to what you wrote:
"given how many Chinese-Americans turn out to be passing secrets to China"
If you want to claim that by "how many", you meant "1" (and even that is questionable depending on if you count naturalized citizens or not), I think you are just being reluctant to admit you were wrong. But putting that aside, the null hypothesis is that there is no statistically significant relationship between being Chinese-American and likelihood of being a spy - the burden is on you, not me.
Given that criminals tend to have long histories of crimes and that only a fraction of crimes are caught, then yes: knowing someone faced charges ought to massively raise your estimate that they have committed past crimes which they were not caught for. Of course there are many innocent people who have been charged, but crank your Bayes theorem here...
The reason we have a very high bar like 'innocent until proven guilty' is not because this is any sort of information-theoretic or statistically-optimal criteria which balances some chosen ratios of innocent:guilty convicted, but as a check-and-balance on the power of government and a mechanism against tyranny and abuse of the laws.
> But putting that aside, the null hypothesis is that there is no statistically significant relationship between being Chinese-American and likelihood of being a spy - the burden is on you, not me.
The burden here is on any kibbitzer who wants to engage in hindsight and accuse anyone of racism for suggesting that maybe Chinese scientists are not precisely as trustworthy as natives with regard to national security.
What kind of stupid idiot you are, by your stupid accusation.
Because of your stupid reasoning, let me construct some ideas:
By your reasoning, we should stop hiring Chinese and Russians because they are known to be hacker-active states. I should be thankful that I received a security internship back in summer and my employer should be glad I had a great chance of being a Chinese spy, injecting backdoor, because I care about my origin and I read Chinese newspaper in addition to New York Time because I happen to like NYT.
And so when certain ethnic groups celebrating their ethnic holiday (Mexican, African Americans), we should be careful because they have a spiritual attachment to their origin (or their parents' origin) that they are also likely to be spy or going to be working for their mother country.
Sure we can't assume they won't. I mean I see American born kids turn into terrorists and there are people who just decide they have enough of US government and run to another country (right, you know, those run to North Korean).
We should also note that UK immigrants might have a tendency to take back US as UK's colonies, and Canadian should be careful of US immigrants because there is some people who believe US should own Canada too.
Right?
No. Different groups have different risks. That is the point. Someone ethnically Chinese born and raised in China has a different risk of being a spy for China than a white Mormon who has never set foot outside North America.
> What kind of stupid idiot you are, by your stupid accusation. Because of your stupid reasoning, let me construct some ideas:...Right?
No. Please read what I have read, and not what you think I have read. Your absolutist reasoning, without any probabilities but with tons of exaggeration, is not applicable to what I have said.
-- Konrad Zuse
He seemed to have had a very interesting political career in china as well.
Yep, looks like the FBI created the problem they were ineptly trying to prevent.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-hatched-some-crazy-te...
Qian returned to Caltech in 1949 and a year later faced the accusation by two former members of the Los Angeles Police Department's "Red Squad" that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
thanks LAPD
for a question like this to appear on HN makes me realize why mccarthy-era tactics were popular for so long.
they obviously work, even on smart people, and even in retrospect.
If someone produces excellent, productive research, and that research is leaking, simply ratchet up security around the research until the leaks stop. If there is a spy, they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information further. At that point, leaks will stop, but good research will continue, and that outcome provides much greater utility than the alternatives.
People are often too preoccupied with persecution that they view the absence of persecuting anyone of something as wrong. In the US we are preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere may be doing something wrong and that we should be punishing that person because they deserve it. In this case (and in most cases) persecution didn't solve the problem, but tightened security would have.
This never happens in espionage. Once you go down that rabbit hole even a little, the people you're giving information to own you. They have the power to instantly ruin your life. If you stop giving them information, they inform on you. Most spies never wanted to be spies. They got sucked into a crappy situation by making one crappy decision, then they're stuck with it forever.
But people get focused on whether people are "with us or against us". He was with science. In the end, that's all that matters. Nations are not important.
and it succeeded, obviously, to great effect.
"The man deemed responsible for these technological feats also was labeled a spy in the 1999 Cox Report issued by Congress after an investigation into how classified information had been obtained by the Chinese."
I would imagine his opinion might count for something.
I say he probably wasn't interested in helping the Chinese government (both Nationalist and Communist). I think he likes being in his laboratory and doesn't care about politics.
But if no evidence ever found, our government should apologize.