U.S. Drove Out Founder of China's Rocketry Program
Envoi de ms le 16 Octobre 2003 16:39:10:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1015-03.htm
Published on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 by the Associated Press
U.S. Drove Out Founder of China's Rocketry Program
by Joe McDonald
BEIJING - 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."
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