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The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics

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Those who recalled their time with Qian Xuesen in Pasadena and Cambridge described him as a genius and not much more. He rubbed shoulders with luminaries like Jack Parsons, who would fall to the occult, and Frank Malina, who would be lured away by utopian communism. Qian, meanwhile, cut a conventional figure. He held himself aloof from worldly affairs. He was an engineer; he built what he was asked to build, without too much concern for what uses it might be put to. He worked as diligently for Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as he did—once the Americans ejected him—for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. In 1945, he met Wernher von Braun in Bavaria; they spoke about wind tunnels. The only reason that the U.S. generals trusted a “resident alien” to come along on the Nazi debrief was that he was disinterested, but not disloyal. In his five years working with the highest levels of military clearance, there was never even a rumor of espionage. In 1949, the FBI checked up on Qian. Their job w

Yasmin Dangor/Xi'an Railway Station Those who recalled their time with Qian Xuesen in Pasadena and Cambridge described him as a genius and not much more. He rubbed shoulders with luminaries like Jack Parsons, who would fall to the occult, and Frank Malina, who would be lured away by utopian communism. Qian, meanwhile, cut a conventional figure. He held himself aloof from worldly affairs. He was an engineer; he built what he was asked to build, without too much concern for what uses it might be put to. He worked as diligently for Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as he did—once the Americans

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