rained in the U.S., Scientist Became China's 'Rocket King'

By JASON DEAN and STEPHEN MILLER

Known in China as the "Father of Chinese Aerospace" or simply the "Rocket King," Qian Xuesen helped launch his native country's missile program after his burgeoning scientific career in the U.S. was truncated by allegations of Communist leanings.

Mr. Qian, who died Oct. 31 at the age of 98, came to the U.S. in 1935 as a student and became one of the leading scientists working on the country's nascent missile program.

As a researcher at the California Institute of Technology in the 1940s, Mr. Qian helped develop the first U.S. solid-fuel missiles during World War II. But his career in the U.S. came to an abrupt halt in the 1950s, when he was accused of having Communist ties and ordered deported.

After battling the allegations for several years, he returned to China, where he became the leader of a coterie of Chinese-born, U.S.-trained missile scientists, and created a program for China to educate its own aerospace engineers.

In the 1960s, he guided or contributed to a series of successes in Chinese aerospace, including tests of its first short- and medium-range missiles, and, following China's successful detonation of a nuclear warhead in 1964, its first nuclear ballistic missile. The decade culminated with the launch of China's first satellite in 1970, a triumphant moment for China, although it came 13 years after Russia's Sputnik launch. His work laid the foundation for China's first manned space flight, in 2003.

Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Mr. Qian came to the U.S. in 1935 on a scholarship funded by the Chinese government. After spending a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he moved to the California Institute of Technology. There, he joined the so-called suicide squad of young Caltech scientists who took on risky assignments testing rocket prototypes in the desert.

Near the end of World War II, Mr. Qian was given the rank of a U.S. Air Force colonel, and worked in the military on early designs of jet engines. In the war's aftermath, he was part of a team that debriefed former German rocket scientists, including Werner von Braun, later the leader of the U.S. space program. He became director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech, the predecessor to today's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In 1950, Mr. Qian's security clearance was revoked on the grounds -- never proved -- of Communist associations. He subsequently was arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Many of his possessions were confiscated, including a grand piano he was planning to ship to China, on suspicion that he was smuggling classified materials. He spent the next five years in legal limbo, prevented from leaving the U.S. and regarded as a possible security threat. Caltech stood behind him, but in 1955 he agreed to leave the U.S.

"He was Joe McCarthy's present to the Chinese," says John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "It was the anti-Communist mood in the 1950s that led him home."

Back in China, Mr. Qian thrived under the new Communist regime. He encouraged the government to develop China's aviation industry for national defense, and he was assigned to head the development of China's rocket program.

In 1958, he joined the Communist Party, and provided advice to the government on agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's disastrous forced industrialization program.

During the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a period that halted progress in most areas of Chinese society, Mr. Qian was largely shielded from the persecution faced by many intellectuals, said Qian Xuemin, a retired professor who is Mr. Qian's cousin. Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai "recognized his importance, and they protected him," she said.

Mr. Qian retired in 1991. In addition to accolades in China for his work as a rocket scientist, he was an outspoken and influential supporter of research into qigong, a Chinese meditative practice.

Mr. Qian remained bitter about his treatment by the U.S. government, Ms. Qian, his cousin, said. In 1979, Caltech gave Mr. Qian its Distinguished Alumni Award, but Mr. Qian declined to travel to California to receive the prize in person. A former colleague from CalTech eventually brought the award to Mr. Qian in China in 2001, on his 90th birthday.

—Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.

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