The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.
Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie.
Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.
There are biopic films about people who founded or transformed businesses like Steve Jobs, Roy Kroc, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Blackberry, etc. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but I wouldn't describe that genre as boring. Probably the bigger issue is getting people to see a biopic about someone who isn't already a household name.
That one, about a member of Congress, has a sex scene in a hot tub. It had movie potential.
The Roy Krock movie worked because audiences understand McDonalds. Trying to explain the relationship between R&D policy and defense spending is much tougher. Although see Heinlein's "Destination Moon".
I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.
Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)
But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?
> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy
Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.
The US continues to repeat this mistake by adding hurdles for immigrant talent while persecuting or being generally racist against Chinese-American scientists [1]. Despite that, there's still a net influx of foreign talent coming to the US whereas relatively few people move to China.
I understood that as the actual thesis of the article; it discusses the highest profile example in detail, but the central claim seems to be that this was essentially the system working "as intended", and that it continued working this way through today.
Well, you could ask “why haven’t any Pohl Anderson novels been turned into a movie?” and many similar questions.
Hollywood shies away from anything squicky or weird and you could find plenty of it in the mid-20th century of occultism and the O.T.O. I mean we’ve had the social revolutions of the 1970s but movies walk a straight and narrow line pursuing a mass market that used to be there…. Wicca is widespread and usually pretty tame these days but so far as the mass media is concerned it either doesn’t exist or it is one of those movies like The Craft where some preppy-drab Beverly Hills high schoolers get to change their wardrobe temporarily for goth stuff they got at Hot Topic and it’s an improvement because preppy-drab makes olive drab look… not so drab.
An error rate of 0 is unachievable. Given that, it’s a question of your tolerance for error and the consequences of the opposite kind of error. Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties.
The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely.
After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer.
Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.
> Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties.
At least on the American side, it doesn't sound at all like this was uniformly agreed upon; there seem to have been people on the American side (including at least one relatively high-ranking military/government official) who felt strongly that this was a strategic blunder. That doesn't mean your counterargument is incorrect, but I don't think it's as simple as "they knew what they were giving up".
A large part of the argument of the article seems to be that the political pressures for the US were misaligned with the long-term incentives, which is a plausible explanation for why the president (who is not a subject matter expert for most things) might override a decision from someone who is much more knowledgeable about the specific circumstances. There are plenty of places to disagree with the analysis presented (e.g. whether it's preferable to have a system that optimizes for this sort of long-term planning or if other things should take precedence), but it's not clear to me from your comment whether you're actually trying to disagree with the conclusions they draw or about the history of what happened.
To be clear, disagreeing about the history would be reasonable, given that understanding what happened is rarely straightforward from reading a single secondary source like this, but if that's what you're doing, it might help to be more explicit about it.
Definitely a famous story that gets retold and almost mythologized in China. When I taught over there, several different middle school students independently told me about this story.
I had a friend working at a startup I interned at who had come over on a student visa, gotten a temporary visa to work, but then eventually was not able to keep it and ended up moving to Canada and working there. It's never made sense to me why we'd want to kick people out after they've received education here; if anything, it would make more sense to require them to work here for a bit after (although I'd also probably be opposed to that because I generally just don't like treating people as cogs in a working machine).
Also Erdal Arikan. Turkish researcher denied a Green Card, so he was invited by the Chinese Govt. to capitalize on his research there instead. His work led to 5G technology.
Fun fact;In 1992 ,he advised Chinese leaders to focus on new energy vehicles as they would never catch up on ice.
Looks like his counsel was taken as we can see the results today.
Also fun fact, he advised Mao on agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, using rough estimates of photosynthetic efficiency to calculate potential crop yields. Those estimates were far removed from reality and indirectly contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, while other countries were benefiting from the success of the Green Revolution.
He didn't advise Mao directly. He published his "rough estimate" in China Youth Daily on June 16, 1958 as 《粮食亩产量会有多少？》. It's possible, though unconfirmed, that Mao (or his secretary) read this article and was influenced. But yeah, the math was bad and off by an order of magnitude. Even geniuses can't be right all the time and I guess he was quite irresponsible for publishing a hand-wavy back-of-the-envelope estimate like that.
Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.
Being raised by KMT and switching to CCP via the US matches this general narrative. But perhaps 'pragmatist' is more appropriate than 'opportunist'. After all, there were only so many countries with a missile program and resources for someone who speaks Mandarin and English and had a family who didn't want to learn Russian. In the interpretations I've been given, Taiwan at that stage was a mess. I think he was probably deeply hurt by the purge and would have stayed in the US and contributed further if it wasn't for the tide of McCarthyist nationalism. The US in the current era definitely has similar tones, which I have personally encountered. This warning piece comes late and may fall on deaf ears.
The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring. Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie.
Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)
The Roy Krock movie worked because audiences understand McDonalds. Trying to explain the relationship between R&D policy and defense spending is much tougher. Although see Heinlein's "Destination Moon".
Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)
But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?
Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.
Well, part of the Oppenheimer biopic is about J. Robert being thrust into that kind of role.
> Oppenheimer ... rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Los_Alam...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons
who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.
How does this man not have a movie?
Hollywood shies away from anything squicky or weird and you could find plenty of it in the mid-20th century of occultism and the O.T.O. I mean we’ve had the social revolutions of the 1970s but movies walk a straight and narrow line pursuing a mass market that used to be there…. Wicca is widespread and usually pretty tame these days but so far as the mass media is concerned it either doesn’t exist or it is one of those movies like The Craft where some preppy-drab Beverly Hills high schoolers get to change their wardrobe temporarily for goth stuff they got at Hot Topic and it’s an improvement because preppy-drab makes olive drab look… not so drab.
The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely.
After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer.
Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.
At least on the American side, it doesn't sound at all like this was uniformly agreed upon; there seem to have been people on the American side (including at least one relatively high-ranking military/government official) who felt strongly that this was a strategic blunder. That doesn't mean your counterargument is incorrect, but I don't think it's as simple as "they knew what they were giving up".
A large part of the argument of the article seems to be that the political pressures for the US were misaligned with the long-term incentives, which is a plausible explanation for why the president (who is not a subject matter expert for most things) might override a decision from someone who is much more knowledgeable about the specific circumstances. There are plenty of places to disagree with the analysis presented (e.g. whether it's preferable to have a system that optimizes for this sort of long-term planning or if other things should take precedence), but it's not clear to me from your comment whether you're actually trying to disagree with the conclusions they draw or about the history of what happened.
To be clear, disagreeing about the history would be reasonable, given that understanding what happened is rarely straightforward from reading a single secondary source like this, but if that's what you're doing, it might help to be more explicit about it.
How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
https://player.instaread.co/player?article=the-missile-geniu...
EDIT: it's ai if anyone is curious
Qian Xuesen did and did.