Why China is winning the weapons race America is driving away its talent

When the US tried to test a similar weapon in October 2021, it failed. And since then, at least one more successful Chinese test has taken place. The knowledge that the Chinese military is most probably ahead on hypersonic weapon delivery technology has ignited debate in Washington defence circles.

It didn’t have to be this way. Qian came to America as a “Boxer Scholar”, on a scholarship granted to Chinese students to make amends for America’s invasion and looting of China during the Boxer Rebellion. His career as a top defence scientist began in the service of the United States. He served as one of the leading aeronautics experts in the American military during the Second World War and went on to become a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was described by his friend and supervisor, the Hungarian-American aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán, as an “undisputed genius”.

But in 1950, Qian’s adopted home turned against him. A paranoid fog settled over America and Mao Zedong’s Communists, once supported in their fight against the fascist Japanese invader, came to be seen as ideological enemies. In the summer of 1950, Qian was visited by the FBI. Despite the fact he was married to the daughter of a prominent Chinese Nationalist, he was accused of socialising with American Communists. His classified security clearance was revoked, which forbade him from working on some of his most ambitious projects.

Qian felt suffocated “under a cloud of suspicion”. He told his senior colleagues and the FBI that “the only gentlemanly thing left to do is to depart”. His friends in the military and at Caltech begged him to stay and fought to get his clearance reinstated. But after tentatively delaying his departure to China, he was arrested. His luggage was seized for containing boxes marked “secret”. Yet his allies continued to praise his talents and loyalty; J. Robert Oppenheimer even tried to tempt him to Princeton to work on computing alongside the celebrated “Man from the Future”, John von Neumann.

Later that year, the American immigration service announced its intention to deport Qian, though the plan was foiled by the State Department, which was wary of sending military experts to the Chinese Communists. In the end, Qian was condemned to a half-life in America: he and his wife lived under constant surveillance, and although he was able to continue working, his activities were strictly curtailed.

For a man of such talent, who had been devoted to America and felt torn about leaving, this intellectual ostracism proved unbearable. In 1955, Qian smuggled a note to the Chinese Communist Party, pleading for their help to get him out of America. Later that year, President Eisenhower authorised Qian’s release as part of a high-stakes prisoner swap with China in Geneva. In return, America brought home a dozen or so pilots captured during the Korean War. Zhou Enlai, a towering figure in 20th-century Chinese politics, remarked: “We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.”

America would come to regret hounding him out. On his return in September 1955, Qian instantly became one of China’s most influential military scientists. Within a year he had helped to establish the National Defence Ministry’s 5th Institute, of which he served as founding director. As the Chinese government now puts it, this “marked the beginning of China’s aerospace industry and missile development”. The 5th Institute has since morphed into China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation, the main contractor for China’s space programme.

When Qian set up the Institute, China barely had the technology to build a decent car, let alone satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The supply chain for basic materials, including rubber, aluminium and stainless steel, was poorly developed, and the techniques for conjuring advanced parts from them were unknown.

One of the first things Qian did was join a delegation to the USSR to ask for military assistance. Joseph Stalin coughed up around 10,000 volumes of technical guidance, 100 advisors and a dozen or so missiles for the Chinese to copy. But the circumstances of China’s research programmes remained primitive. In the first few years of the Institute’s life, thousands of scientists worked for Qian using the most basic tools and under challenging conditions. Many toiled shirtless in a vast hangar with no windows or air conditioning, operating mechanical calculators by hand. According to Iris Chang, author of the exquisite 1995 account of Qian’s work, The Thread of the Silkworm, the first rocket tested by the 5th Institute was filled with fuel using a bike pump.

In 1960, the Soviets withdrew their support. But under Qian’s leadership, China made extraordinary progress in developing its armoury. In 1966, China became the first country to test “a nuclear warhead mounted on a ballistic missile flying over populated areas”. It was incredibly risky, but it worked. An atomic bomb was delivered from Jiuquan in Gansu to its target in the Xinjiang desert atop a Dongfeng-2 missile developed by Qian’s 5th Institute.

As one protégé put it, Qian was always “10 years ahead of time”. But once America realised his value, it was too late. Within a year of the Dongfeng-2 missile test, two American authors published The China Cloud: America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power, in which they blamed China’s advances on the hysteria of McCarthyism, arguing that “without the intentional aid of United States authorities, China’s nuclear weapons and the rockets to carry them would not have been built until the late Seventies”. They also suggested that, had Qian been treated well, he might have stayed and become a leading figure in the American space programme.

This lesson mustn’t be lost on today’s cold warriors. Qian’s story — that of a brilliant and loyal scientist hounded out of America — is not unique. For all the talk of “China stealing US tech”, there is increasingly a risk that brilliant Chinese American scientists will be driven into the CCP’s arms. With science and technology more important than ever in the contest between the great powers, the US risks repeating old mistakes.

Consider the China Initiative, launched by the Trump administration in November 2018. Its stated goal was to stop the Chinese from stealing American technology and intellectual property. But it was ill-defined from the start: referring to both Chinese hacking of leading companies and to the only tangentially related charge of “Chinese propaganda disseminated on our campuses”. When it was shut down in 2022, officials noted that it was nothing more than a “grouping” of cases “under the China Initiative rubric”. “[This] helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”

This wasn’t aided by the fact that the Initiative appeared to lack a competent, sensitive and indeed honest approach. In one case, the FBI admitted to falsifying evidence. In another, the prosecutors admitted to misunderstanding the funding disclosure rules a Chinese-origin scientists was alleged to have broken, and dropped the case. Most of the cases involved scientists, including white Americans, failing to disclose links to China in applications for American funding.

The Initiative left a deep impression on Chinese talent in America, and helped create an atmosphere of hostility that would have been familiar to Qian. One study suggests that significant portions of Chinese-descent American scientists feel unwelcome, unsafe and fearful of conducting research or applying for grants. The American scientific community is not happy about this: articles in science magazines and a growing body of evidence point to the damage it has done to America’s ability to attract and retain precious Chinese scientific talent.

It’s not just Republicans scaring off scholars. The liberal establishment’s insistence on affirmative action for black and Hispanic students has long resulted in discrimination against Asian Americans, who tend to outperform other ethnic groups academically. At Harvard, an internal study estimated that if admissions were based on academic performance alone, the proportion of Asian Americans would double to 43%. It’s a similar story at other Ivy League universities.  Some Chinese scientists considering raising a family in America look upon this discrimination and despair.

Is it any surprise then that America is losing Chinese talent? Now, more than ever, brilliant young Chinese scientists who have studied in the US seem to end up going back home. According to one report on Tsinghua University, by many accounts China’s finest, the number of graduates going to the US to continue their studies has plummeted — while the numbers going to Singapore and the UK have risen and remained stable respectively. One study focusing on leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence concludes that America still receives a net benefit from the Chinese brain drain — but much less so than a few years ago.

Meanwhile, China has gone to great lengths to grow its pool of top scientists. A focus on investment into education, on sponsoring study abroad, on promoting Chinese traditions that encourage intensive schooling, and on providing grants, materiel, sponsorship and prestige to mature scientists via the “Thousand Talents” programme and others like it have paid off. According to one report, analysing the top 10% most highly cited research publications from the past five years in 44 key technology areas, China’s institutions and their scientists are leading the world in 37 of 44 key technology areas such as batteries, synthetic biology, 6G, quantum sensing, and drone swarms. By 2050, according to one estimate, the highly-able STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) workforce in China could be 10 times larger than in the US and comparable with or larger than the rest of the world combined.

In this context, America’s efforts to limit Chinese companies’ access to high-tech chips have proved futile. Last October, the launch of a new Huawei phone shocked Washington because it contained a chip of a quality that US sanctions were supposed to have rendered unattainable. Starved of American chips, Huawei has had to innovate or perish. It has innovated.

What Washington failed to realise is that Chinese technology theft is no longer the only problem. IP heists have been crucial to China’s rise. But now, the greatest “threat” comes not from copycats but innovators. Washington, however, continues to respond in a way that might have been effective 20 years ago — but may have undesired consequences today. The paradigm of “China stealing our technology” is not a full reflection of the reality; Chinese scientists, working in China and elsewhere, are already among the world’s finest.

All is not lost. Plenty of Chinese scientists still wish to escape Xi Jinping’s oppressive regime and its spiralling nationalism. As the tale of Qian Xuesen shows, there is much at stake in the battle for great minds. For one thing, we should all fear the prospect of great technological might in the hands of a tyrant. Even Nikita Khrushchev wrote of his horror at Chairman Mao making light of nuclear holocaust at a 1957 meeting of Communist leaders in Moscow: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.”

The madness of Mao touched Qian’s life too. These were the days of China’s blossoming missile programme, but also of an evangelical Communist-religious fervour and the Great Leap Forward. By some accounts, Qian took part in Mao’s campaign against flies, rats, sparrows and mosquitos, and was spotted kneeling in an alley near the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing, smashing fly larvae with a spade or screaming and waving a bamboo cane around in order to scare away sparrows. In 1958, he published a series of sermon-like articles in the People’s Daily extolling Maoist themes: “For our scientists — the leaders of the scientific ranks — their responsibility is great. They must be able to mobilise the masses and rely on the masses. But if they are to be able to do this, they must not only resolve to be red, they have to really be red, red all the way through.”

Qian’s writings would become even more disturbing: one article claimed that since the only hard limit on the agricultural productivity of a field is the availability of energy via sunlight, China could boost its food production twentyfold at least. In the eyes of some of his peers, this served as inspiration and justification for Mao’s plan to merge peasant collectives into huge bureaucratic farming units. This programme — combined with an insane initiative to force everyone, Qian and his colleagues included, into operating steel furnaces — led to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

For a brilliant man to engage in such nonsense is baffling. For a man leading a WMD programme to engage in such nonsense is terrifying. As Qian’s would-be colleague John von Neumann put it: “The combination of physics and politics could render the surface of the earth uninhabitable.” In the era of Chairman Xi, Donald Trump and Taiwan, these are words worth remembering.

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The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

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