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1. Thread: Some recent articles highlight Qian Xuesen, the Chinese rocket pioneer who everyone tends to bring up when they wish to reference how past US policies of pressure/expulsion led to deportations/emigration of US-trained or US-based experts who then built China's science.
2: Qian wasn't alone, so it's worth noting how many of China's strategic weapons science and engineering pioneers returned there from the United States.
3: Or they returned to China from education, study, research, or service in Europe, often in the mid-to-late 1940s and before the Chinese Communist Party took power. Much of China's post-1949 science and engineering relied on prior interchange with the United States and Europe.
4: Qian Xuesen's PhD was from Caltech in aerospace engineering, where he studied under von Karman, then held the Goddard Chair and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His story is well known. 
5: Some less well-known folks include Liang Shoupan, whose M.S. in aeronautical engineering was from MIT in 1939. He became a leading cruise missile designer.
6: Ren Xinmin was chief designer of China's liquid propellant rocket engines and chief engineer of its communication satellite programs. His PhD was from the University of Michigan; he returned to China in 1949.
Tu Shou'e was chief designer of China's ICBM. He had an MS an aeronautical engineering from MIT and worked at Curtis Aircraft in Buffalo from 1943-45.
Zhu Guangya, a pioneer of China's nuclear weapons, earned his PhD from the University of Michigan.
9: Wang Ganchang a nuclear physicist who was in overall charge of developing the explosive assembly and initiator for China's atomic bomb, earned his PhD at the University of Berlin.
10: Yang Jiachi, a space technology pioneer, earned his PhD at Harvard and returned to China in 1956. Along with Nanchang, he was one of four scientists who later urged Deng Xiaoping to pursue an accelerated high technology development plan in 1986.
11: A third was Wang Daheng, a most remarkable man and the pioneer of optics in China, who studied at Imperial College in London and then worked in England before returning to China in 1948. I tweeted about him last week in another context.
12: The fourth was Chen Fangyun, also with experience in England, a radio electronics pioneer who played a pivotal role in developing telemetry and tracking systems.
13: And as @LorenzoTerm points out, Qian Sanqiang, who worked with the Joliot-Curies in Paris, was instrumental to the development of physics in China.
14: These were quite remarkable people, part of a remarkable Chinese generation that had deep experience in the West. Many of them suffered hardship in the Cultural Revolution, notwithstanding their contributions to Chinese science and defense technology.
15: I wrote about each of these men and many others in my 2003 book, “China’s Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear to the Information Age” sup.org/books/title/?i…
