It was not all smooth sailing for Qian Lao to return to China, and many details have not been disclosed so far.
01
On October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was founded, and a few days later, Mr. and Mrs. Qian Xuesen, who were in the United States, talked about the good news with several Chinese students studying in the United States.
In fact, as early as 1948, Qian Xuesen was ready to choose the opportunity to serve the motherland, so he quit the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Group and resigned from the Naval Ordnance Research Institute as a consultant.
After hearing about the founding of New China, I couldn't wait.
In the summer of 1950, Qian Xuesen sorted out his things, loaded 800 kilograms of books and notebooks onto the "President Wilson" ship, and then took his wife and children back to China on a Canadian plane.
Upon learning of the news that Qian Xuesen was going to return to China, the US government directly revoked Qian Xuesen's qualification to participate in classified research.
In September of the same year, Qian Xuesen was arrested by the FBI before leaving for the pretext of returning to China to visit relatives, and was detained on Termina Island on "trumped-up" charges.
Why is Qian Xuesen imprisoned?
U.S. Navy Kimble said the answer: "He knows the core secrets of all U.S. missile projects, and one Qian Xuesen is worth five Marine divisions, and I'd rather shoot this guy than let him go back to China!"
Either Qian Xuesen is too strong, or the Marine Division is too weak.
In short, such a comparison is a good judgment.
Although Qian Xuesen was only detained for 15 days, the United States is a real dog, and the guards used searchlights to aim at him 24 hours a day, and opened the iron gate every 10 minutes.
I have sympathized with Saddam's experience before, and it turns out that these methods have long been used on Qian Lao.
The dean of the California Institute of Technology and Qian Xuesen's mentor couldn't stand it, so the group scraped together $15,000 and finally released Qian Xuesen from prison on bail.
The moment his wife Jiang Ying saw her husband, her whole person collapsed, she lost 15 kilograms in just 15 days, and she couldn't even speak.
Under Jiang Ying's careful care, Qian Xuesen was able to recover.
Although he has been released from prison on bail, his words and deeds are still monitored, and Qian Xuesen can only devote himself to research.
Until a piece of news brought a turnaround.
In June 1955, Qian Xuesen saw in the newspaper that China and the United States were negotiating the return of expatriates from both sides.
The newspaper wrote: "All Chinese students who wish to return to China have been released."
This is a blatant nonsense by the US Government.
Qian Xuesen believed that he had no hope of returning to China, so he could only pin his hopes on the Chinese government.
He first got rid of the surveillance of the spies, and took advantage of the surveillance gap to ask Jiang Ying to write a letter on cigarette paper with his left hand and send it to his sister Jiang Hua in Belgium.
How to send the letter is also a difficult problem.
Qian Xuesen lied that his wife went shopping in the mall and went with her.
At the entrance of the mall, Qian Xuesen suddenly stopped leaving and let Jiang Ying go in alone. The spies only had to stare at Qian Xuesen, so they didn't follow Jiang Ying, which was in Qian Xuesen's arms.
Jiang Ying was afraid that the spies would react, so he took three steps and made two steps, and threw the letter into the mailbox of the mall while no one was paying attention.
After her sister Jiang Hua received the letter, she did not dare to delay, and immediately mailed it to Qian Xuesen's father Qian Junfu in Shanghai, and Qian Junfu immediately sent it to Chen Shutong in Beijing.
Who is Chen Shutong?
Chen Shutong was vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and he immediately handed it over to Premier Zhou Enlai.
In Premier Zhou's words: "This letter is of great value!"
This brings us to the specifics of the Geneva Conference.
02
The Geneva Conference was mainly aimed at discussing the peaceful settlement of the Korean issue and the restoration of the peace issue in Indochina, and "repatriation of expatriates" was only one of the topics.
Why China attaches so much importance to it has to be taken into account the context of the time.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, all walks of life were in ruins, especially after the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and more attention was paid to the cultivation of talents.
In order to find high-end talents from all walks of life in a short period of time, we must focus on Chinese students in other countries.
So the Chinese government investigated the situation of overseas students and helped them return to China.
At that time, most of the people who studied abroad were to acquire knowledge and build the motherland.
Even when Chinese students from other countries are returning to China, the United States has even detained more than 5,000 Chinese students.
For this reason, these international students themselves formed the "Association of Chinese Scientists in the United States", but the US government judged it to be an illegal organization and was forced to disband.
Before the Korean War, these international students could also detour to Hong Kong to return to China, but now because of the defeat on the battlefield, the United States is in a hurry to seek medical treatment, and has begun to restrict international students, especially high-end talents (such as science, engineering and medical majors) to monitor, among which Qian Xuesen is the most.
The U.S. government has ordered them not to leave the country, and if they violate it, they will be fined up to $5,000 or sentenced to up to five years in prison, or both.
The only thing that could make the United States jealous was the military personnel in China at that time, many of whom were captured on the Korean battlefield.
The most important of these was the American B-29 strategic reconnaissance plane shot down by the volunteers, which contained 14 servicemen, excluding 3 who died unlucky, and 11 people who parachuted to escape.
The 11 people who were captured were all technical talents in the army, such as Captain Eugene John Way, Colonel John Knox Arnold, and Major William Hull Baumer.
In addition to this, there were 4 American pilots who were captured on the Korean battlefield.
These people are all top-notch talents of the US Air Force, and they are really afraid of what will come to them, and the development of the Chinese Air Force is stagnant, and the United States is afraid that these people will be turned against them.
In this way, China and the United States have their own needs.
However, the United States belongs to both wanting to be and wanting to set up that, so it is contrary to the yang and the yin, and after several negotiations, there has been no substantial progress, and even the "intermediary" Britain has complained: I will take a few hundred yuan, and you still want me to play with my life!
In the previous negotiations, the United States did let some Chinese students return to China, but none of the top talents were released, especially on the issue of Qian Xuesen's return to China.
It was not until the fourth negotiation that Wang Bingnan took out Qian Xuesen's letter and directly exposed the lie that the United States did everything possible to prevent Chinese students from returning to China.
The U.S. side could no longer pretend to be any longer, and immediately said that the restrictions on Chinese students had been lifted and everyone could leave freely.
In this way, Qian Xuesen was able to return to China.
After boarding the pier, Qian Xuesen said to his friends who saw him off: "I will do my best to help the Chinese people build a happy and dignified country." ”
Qian Xuesen's mentor von Kármán was very emotional: "The United States has given Qian Xuesen, the greatest genius and the most outstanding rocket expert in the field of rocket technology, to Red China." ”
But on the way home, Qian Xuesen's family was also walking on thin ice and was terrified.
03
For a scientist of Qian Xuesen's level, the United States is also trying its best to embarrass him.
After Qian Xuesen's family boarded the cruise ship, they were arranged in a cramped third-class cabin, until three days later, Allen, one of the leaders of the American feminist movement, saw this scene and became angry.
She approached the captain and asked him solemnly: "Don't you know him?
The captain was under pressure to transfer the Qian family to first class.
When the cruise ship arrived in Hong Kong, the atmosphere became tense. Because at that time, Hong Kong did not return to the motherland, and there was a mixture of fish and dragons, Premier Zhou ordered early: Don't stay in Hong Kong!
After receiving Qian Xuesen's family, the general manager of China Resources Company and China Travel Service Hong Kong, who were responsible for the reception, directly transferred to a small yacht and drove to Kowloon, and then took a train from Kowloon to Shenzhen through Luohu Port.
On the Luohu Bridge, Jiang Ying, who has always been calm, suddenly said to his son: "If there is a bullet coming at us in a while, we will go to block it, we can't let the bullet hit your father, his life is more important than our life!"
Fortunately, Qian Xuesen's family arrived in Shenzhen smoothly, which can be regarded as a thrill.
After Qian Xuesen returned to China, he went non-stop to understand China's industrial situation, and at that time, the industry of the three eastern provinces was relatively developed, so Qian Xuesen went to Harbin, which almost became the capital of New China.
Chen Geng, who was in charge of the reception, was always humorous, and he asked a question head-on: "Can the Chinese engage in missiles?"
"Yes! Foreigners can, why can't we Chinese! Is it shorter than them?"
This is definitely a great belief and recognition of one's own knowledge.
We'll know what happened after that.
In October 1964, the first atomic bomb was successfully exploded, which meant that China had completely stood on its feet.
It can be said that due to Qian Xuesen's return to China, China's missile and atomic bomb launch time has been pushed forward by at least 20 years.
If Eisenhower had known that this was the end, he would not have agreed to Qian Xuesen's return to China.
In fact, Qian Xuesen's mentor von Kármán foresaw why the United States didn't kill a killer? Or is it difficult to kill a foreign student?
In fact, this is not the case.
As mentioned earlier, the return of Qian Xuesen to China is largely due to the needs of both sides, and China has 15 US Air Force personnel, and if these people are instigated, the Air Force technology will be leaked, which the United States does not want to see.
There are several reasons for this.
04
Qian Xuesen's fame is too great, he is not only a scientist, but also a colonel in the United States Army, a close disciple of von Kármen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the director of the United States Jet Propulsion Center.
In addition to these identities, Qian Xuesen has also been involved in US secrecy work, which shows its importance.
Therefore, the United States is simply restricting it and conducting surveillance.
Later, he agreed to let him return to China, in fact, to a large extent, because of Eisenhower's miscalculation.
He believes that Qian Xuesen has been detained for five years, and has not participated in the study of US secrecy work in these five years, and the information he has is not as valuable as he thought before.
To put it simply, Eisenhower believed that the information that Qian Xuesen currently possessed had been surpassed by new research after five years of changes. The information that Qian Xuesen knew had become common knowledge in the Soviet Union.
The president of the United States obviously underestimated Qian Xuesen.
not only underestimated Qian Xuesen, but also underestimated China.
The United States can let go of money and return to China, but it also thinks that he will not be able to set off storms after he goes back.
This is mainly because of the fact that China's economy is backward, especially steel production.
In 1951, China's steel output was 900,000 tons;
In 1952, China's steel production was 1.35 million tons;
In 1953, China's steel output was 1.77 million tons;
In 1954, China's steel production was 2.23 million tons;
In 1955, China's steel output was 2.85 million tons;
Looking at the steel production of the United States in 1955, it was 106 million tons, which is not an order of magnitude.
When Qian Xuesen returned to China, the aviation and rocket missiles he studied needed these as foundations.
Therefore, the United States believes that after he returns to China, there is no good stage for him to show his talents, just like a top chef, without a good knife and pot, his skills will be greatly reduced.
In addition, the United States also wants to be famous, after all, it prides itself on being a beacon country of freedom.
This can be learned from Cao Cao, he did not kill Liu Bei back then, to a large extent, to attract talents.
The same is true of the United States, which claims to be a "country of freedom and democracy", and in that war-torn era, a large number of talents and wealth from Eurasia poured into the United States to escape the war.
Even now, talents from all over the world want to play their role in the United States, and students want to go to the United States to be gilded.
So, if the United States was going to kill the money in the first place, what would those top talents who stayed in the United States think?
You know, the United States, which is a country of immigrants, has top talents in many fields who are immigrants, and the United States is not afraid that these people will go to the Soviet Union?
In fact, in the final analysis, we all look at things from God's perspective, but the United States does not know where Qian Xuesen's return to China is moving, it is simply arming China, if they can predict the outcome, they will definitely kill them.
Of course, it is not excluded that there is another possibility, that is, Qian Lao is really difficult to kill, and the United States did not succeed in killing him, so we only knew about it, after all, there are many talents in various fields that we are not familiar with, and we don't even know their names, let alone know that they have returned to China.