U.S. drove out founder of China's rocketry program

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:51:06 -0300
From: Claudio Gutierrez <cgutierrez () improvement cl>
Subject: U.S. drove out founder of China's rocketry program
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

BEIJING (AP) -- The founder of China's rocketry program that on Wednesday 
launched its first astronaut into space began his career building ballistic 
missiles for the U.S. government during World War II.

Tsien Hsue-shen, 92, was a U.S. Army officer, a co-founder of NASA's Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology. Colleagues called him one of the brightest minds in the new 
field of aeronautics.

Then, in 1955, Tsien was driven out of the United States at the height of 
anticommunist fervor.

Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Tsien left for the 
United States after winning a scholarship to graduate school in 1936. He 
earned a doctorate and became a professor at the California Institute of 
Technology, later moving to MIT.

During World War II, Tsien helped to design ballistic missiles for the U.S. 
military. In 1945, as an Army colonel with a security clearance, he was 
sent to Europe on a mission to examine captured rocket technology from Nazi 
Germany.

Tsien studied the German V-2 rocket and interviewed its chief designer, 
Wernher von Braun, who would go on to play a key role in the American 
manned space program.

After the war, Tsien married the daughter of a military adviser to Chinese 
leader Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, Tsien applied to become a U.S. 
citizen, shortly before Chiang's Nationalist forces were defeated by Mao 
Zedong's communists.

As anticommunist unease in the United States mounted, the FBI confronted 
Tsien in 1950 with a U.S. Communist Party document from 1938 that listed 
him as a member. Tsien denied being a communist, but he was briefly 
arrested and lost his security clearance. Washington began hearings to 
deport him, though he was never charged with a crime. After five years of 
virtual house arrest and secret negotiations between Washington and 
Beijing, Tsien left for his homeland in 1955.

Four months later, Tsien presented then-Premier Zhou Enlai with a proposal 
to set up an "aerospace industry for national defense," according to the 
Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily. He joined the party in 1958.

Tsien, whose name also is written Qian Xuesen or Tsien Hsue-sen, led 
development of China's first nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and worked on 
its first satellite, launched in 1970.

He retired in 1991, the year before China's latest manned space program was 
launched. But his research formed the basis for the Long March CZ-2F rocket 
that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit.

Today Tsien is an enigma -- showered with official honors by Beijing, which 
named him "king of rockets," but rarely seen in public.

In her 1996 biography of Tsien, "The Thread of the Silkworm," American 
author Iris Chang says he tried to erase his past, destroying documents and 
asking friends not to talk about him.

In an unusual burst of publicity, Tsien was publicly honored on his 90th 
birthday in 2001. Then-President Jiang Zemin visited him at home, where 
state media said the ailing Tsien was confined to bed. People's Daily ran a 
large photo of the meeting on its front page.

"He's the father of our space industry," Luan Enjie, director of the China 
National Space Administration, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2001. "It's 
difficult to say where we would be without him."

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Space/2003/10/15/226775-ap.html

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