In the early 1950s, the news of Qian Xuesen's persecution in the United States quickly spread to China, and friends in China's scientific and technological circles expressed solidarity with Qian Xuesen through various channels.
The Party Central Committee is extremely concerned about Qian Xuesen's situation in the United States, and the Chinese government has publicly issued a statement condemning the US government for imprisoning Qian Xuesen against his will.
In 1954, by chance, he saw Chen Shutong standing on the top floor of Tiananmen Square in the newspaper, as vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and he decided to write a letter to his father's good friend for help. Just when Premier Zhou Enlai was very anxious about this, Chen Shutong, then vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, received a letter from across the ocean. He took it apart and looked at it, and signed it "Qian Xuesen"! It turned out that he was asking the government of the motherland to help him return home.
In April 1954, the five countries of the United States, Britain, China, the Soviet Union and France held an international conference in Geneva to discuss and resolve the Korean issue and restore peace in Indochina. Zhou Enlai, head of the Chinese delegation attending the meeting, thought that a group of Chinese students and scientists had been detained in the United States, so he instructed that since the Americans had asked British diplomats to unblock relations with us, we should seize this opportunity to open up new channels of contact.
Zhou Enlai and Qian Xuesen
On June 5, 1954, Wang Bingnan, secretary general of the Chinese delegation, and Johnson, a representative of the United States and deputy secretary of state, held preliminary talks on the issue of nationals of the two countries. The United States submitted to the Chinese side a list of U.S. overseas Chinese and some U.S. military personnel detained by China, asking China to give them the opportunity to return to China. In order to show China's sincerity, Zhou Enlai instructed Wang Bingnan to make generous concessions at the third Sino-US talks held on June 15, 1954, and also demanded that the United States stop detaining Qian Xuesen and other Chinese personnel studying in the United States.
The Geneva Conference was closed on 21 July 1954. China's legitimate demands were unreasonably rejected by the US side. In order not to interrupt the communication channels, Zhou Enlai instructed Wang Bingnan and the American side to agree to hold consular-level talks in Geneva from July 22, 1954. To further demonstrate China's sincerity in the Sino-US talks, China released 4 detained U.S. pilots.
The concessions made by China were ultimately aimed at winning Qian Xuesen and other scientists studying in the United States to return to China as soon as possible, but on this crucial issue, US representative Johnson still did not relax at all on the real reason that China could not come up with Qian Xuesen's return to China.
In 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai's ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the United States —even including the release of 11 U.S. pilots captured in the Korean War— in exchange. On August 4, 1955, Qian Xuesen received a notice from the U.S. Immigration Service that he would be allowed to return to China.
On September 17, 1955, Qian Xuesen's wish to return to China was finally realized, and on this day, Qian Xuesen, with his wife Jiang Ying and a pair of young children, boarded the "President Cleveland" ship and embarked on a journey back to the motherland.
In the early morning of October 1, 1955, Qian Xuesen's family finally returned to their dreamed motherland and returned to their hometown.
In the end, a generation of great people Qian Xuesen returned to China!