The Story of Qian Xuesen – A Serious Blunder Of The US Government?

Trigger

Today, I came across an article in Le Monde Diplomatique titled “A second cold war, this time in space/China goes ballistic” (subscription only) published in the May 2013 edition. The opening paragraph mentions “Just after the second world war, a young engineer from Hangzhou, Qian Xuesen, was working for the Pentagon at Caltech’s jet propulsion”.

This engineer died in 2009. The Ney York Times wrote an obituary about him, but left the circumstances of his return to Communist China in 1955 sketchy. To quote from this article (Emphasis added): “But by 1950 his American career was over. Shortly after applying for permission to visit his parents in the newly Communist China, he was stripped of his security clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and accused of secretly being a Communist. The charge was based on a 1938 document of the Communist Party of the United States that showed he had attended a social gathering that the F.B.I. suspected was a meeting of the Pasadena Communist Party [Mr. Xuesen was a founder of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. … Mr. Qian first sought to return to China but was placed under virtual house arrest by the government; later, he sought to stay and fight the accusations, but the government sought to deport him.

In 1955, Mr. Qian was sent back to China, where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put to work developing Chinese rocketry. By many accounts, he later became a committed Communist and served on the party’s ruling body, the Central Committee.” For the LA Times obituary see here.

Released in 1955, in exchange for the repatriation of 11 US airmen captured by China/North Korea
during the Korean War

The Wikipedia article on Mr. Xuesen does not go into any details regarding his repatriation. Are the records still classified?

Is it indeed true that the US government released one of the top rocket scientists of the 20^th century to Communist China in an exchange for a few prisoners of war?

Why did nobody sufficiently question the FBI allegations against this brilliant scientist?

Was this an attempt by the Eisenhower administration to create a counterweight in China to the Soviet Union?

The Stupidest Thing

The NYT article continues: “The loyalty allegations have never been fully resolved. Aviation Week, which named Mr. Qian its man of the year in 2007, quoted Dan Kimball, a former undersecretary of the Navy, as calling Mr. Qian’s deportation “the stupidest thing this country ever did.” A 1999 United States Congress report on Chinese espionage called Mr. Qian a spy, but critics say the report provides no basis other than a claim that he passed to China the secrets of the American Titan missile program, which began years after he had been deported.”