August 1934, China. A young graduate from Shanghai Jiaotong University won a prestigious scholarship and departed for the United States to pursue a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at MIT. A year later, his cousin — who shared the same grandfather, alma mater, and scholarship — followed him to the same school for the same degree. By 1937, shortly after their graduation, the Second Sino-Japanese War had erupted.

The two cousins with mirror-image lives now faced an identical choice: return to China to fight the Japanese invasion, or remain in America as the world descended into WWII. They chose differently. And while both contributed to Allied victory, their decisions set them on drastically different paths — paths that China-born scientists today find themselves repeating amidst the U.S.-China tech competition.

Hsue-Shen Tsien (H.S. Tsien, or better known as Qian Xuesen/钱学森), the elder of the two, chose to remain in the U.S., which paradoxically made him a legend in China. After earning a PhD from Caltech, he stayed on as an associate professor. During World War II, he served on the U.S. government’s Scientific Advisory Board and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, contributing to America’s war effort. By 1949, he had become a full professor, helping to found NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

But when the Korean War erupted and Cold War tensions intensified in 1950, the FBI revoked his security clearance, accusing him of communist sympathies. After five years under house arrest, he was deported to China as part of a prisoner exchange for American airmen. Dan Kimball, then Secretary of the Navy, reportedly said H.S.’s departure was “the stupidest thing this country ever did,” as “he (H.S.) was no more a communist than I was, and we forced him to go.” This effort to securitize U.S. science by purging this suspected “communist” ended up aiding China with its most critical strategic technologies.

Today’s scientists arrive at the same crossroads faced by the two cousins in 1950, where their work has become the prize of great power competition and their identities are increasingly subject to scrutiny. 

Upon returning to China, H.S. was put in charge of the PRC’s missile and space program, where he led the development of strategic assets including Dongfeng ballistic missiles, Dong Fang Hong-1 satellites, and China’s nuclear weapons program. Today in China, schools bear his name, museums preserve his artifacts, plays dramatize his return, and the state promotes his story as a monument to patriotic sacrifice and national achievement. H.S.’s talent, as well as his persecution in a United States blinded by the “Red Scare”, have made his scientific contributions a symbol of patriotism. 

His cousin, Hsue-Chu Tsien (H.C. Tsien, 钱学榘) chose to return to China, which counterintuitively made his family successful in the U.S.. When Japan invaded China, with the dream of developing advanced aircraft for his nation, he served as a colonel in the Republic of China’s (ROC) Air Force. However, approaching the end of the war, he observed the internal corruption of the ROC government, and felt that he could no longer contribute to positive change. After moving back again to the United States in 1944 and becoming a naturalized American citizen, H.C. chose not to return to China when his cousin H.S. was deported. He feared discrimination from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-ruled People’s Republic of China (PRC) due to his professional history working in the Republic of China (ROC)¹The ROC (Republic of China) was established in 1912 after the fall of the Qing Dynasty and governed mainland China under the Nationalist Party (KMT). After the Chinese Civil War, the KMT was defeated by the Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan in 1949, establishing the ROC government there. Meanwhile, the Communists established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on mainland China.. H.C. worked as a chief engineer in the Boeing company and raised a family in America. His younger son Roger Y. Tsien won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, while the elder son Richard W. Tsien chaired the section of neurobiology of the United States National Academy of Sciences. 

In most historical records, particularly in China, H.C. remains a shadow of his more famous cousin. Yet H.C. did not lose more because of choosing the United States. His younger son, Roger, who suffered from asthma as a child, would never have won the Nobel Prize if he had grown up in Beijing. The PRC in the early 1960s, experiencing the Great Famine with tens of millions of starvation deaths, could barely provide a child with enough food to survive, let alone the luxury of spending hours conducting chemistry experiments at home. Meanwhile, although H.S. enjoys fame and glory in China, no one knows how he felt when having to exhibit political commitment — quoting Mao to reaffirm his own authority to survive during the Cultural Revolution, or “scientifically supporting” the Great Leap Forward²The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) was Mao Zedong’s ambitious but catastrophically mismanaged campaign to rapidly industrialize China. It resulted in widespread famine and estimated deaths of millions due to poor planning, overambitious quotas, and forced collectivization.. 

The two cousins had lost contact since H.S. returned to China, which was only somewhat restored after then-U.S. president Nixon visited China in 1972 — an event that marked the end of more than two decades of U.S.-China isolation. The border between the U.S. and China began to be more open, and H.C. was able to return and visit his relatives in China. In 2008, Roger declined Chinese state media’s framing of him as a Chinese scientist: “I grew up entirely in America, but if this should make Chinese people feel good and proud, and it will inspire a lot of young people to do science in China, that’s a good thing.” His comments demonstrate that the nationality of scientists can act as a bridge for inspiration and exchange, rather than simply a border to block knowledge and isolate researchers as national strategic assets. 

Are we returning to the pre-Nixon visit era of science? After the Trump administration’s funding cuts, journalists and scholars in the U.S. have increasingly expressed their concerns that China has attracted and will continue to attract many China-born scientists back with the promise of better funding. The diagnosis seems straightforward: talent follows money. The solution, by this logic, is obviously to restore funding, upgrade equipment, and make the U.S. too rich to leave. 

Yes, money is very important in this game. Just as many seasoned China-born scientists go back because of funding, the next generation of researchers and engineers continues to come to the U.S. for degrees and stay, when big tech offers them paychecks that no Chinese company can match. 

However, most scientists are not driven primarily by appeals to their naked patriotism or plays to their wallets. Neither cousin, H.C. nor H.S., chose the U.S. or China because of money. They chose because they had dreams of serving a nation that offered a bright future, advanced their academic discipline, or contributed to global peace and progress. Additionally, part of the reason the U.S. ecosystem has been such a draw historically for scientists is that it draws talent from around the world — a virtuous cycle of talent breeding excellence across scientific fields and drawing in more talent. 

This cycle is now once again being interrupted by (geo)politics. Today’s scientists arrive at the same crossroads faced by the two cousins in 1950, where their work has become the prize of great power competition and their identities are increasingly subject to scrutiny. Many top AI figures in China were trained in American universities. Equally numerous are the China-born researchers now powering U.S. tech giants. 

…science thrives in safety and freedom, not suspicion and surveillance; and that in a world of shared threats, from climate to conflict, the securitization of science is a cost we cannot afford

Yet on both sides of the Pacific, national securitization and politicization of scientists’ identities have accelerated. The U.S. government and some frontier AI companies are increasingly pushing China-born scientists away with anti-China rhetoric, coupled with the gradual dismantling of the “American dream” that sold a country of freedom and equality. The Chinese government, for its part, actively courts top Chinese scientists abroad and utilizes their returns to propagate patriotism. However, people with overseas education remain suspicious in the eyes of certain government institutions, companies, and the public in China, while the state guards top Chinese AI talents by restricting their global mobility. 

The national securitization of science is self-defeating. H.S. did not defect to China because the PRC offered him better funding. He was forced into China’s arms by American paranoia — by the FBI’s certainty that his ethnicity made him a security threat. When he arrived, he brought the knowledge that built China’s missile program, its nuclear weapons, and its space capabilities. H.C., meanwhile, raised children who won the prestige China had long coveted — a Nobel Prize. The securitization meant to protect each nation ended up handing the other side exactly what it most wanted. Today, Washington and Beijing are repeating this mistake. Scientists are not choosing based on opportunity. They are choosing based on which side they fear less. And fear, when reversed, is far more powerful than any promise of funding.

The solution to the talent question is not whether one nation can out-fund the other. It is whether we will securitize science to the point of suffocation. We will hand our competitors the very strategic advantage we seek to deny them if we continue treating science as a domain of national securitization, if we keep asking scientists to prove they are not a threat based on ethnicity or origin, and if we teach a generation of brilliant minds that borders matter more than breakthroughs.

History teaches us that borders erected to securitize one’s advantage ultimately become the opponent’s advantage. The Tsien cousins’ story demonstrates that the zero-sum talent battles risk losing what actually matters. Despite one fighting for America’s war effort, and the other serving China’s resistance, both of them contributed to the Allied victory and the end of WWII. Today, such dangers are no less urgent. Climate change will not respect borders. Pandemics will not check passports. Artificial intelligence will not become safer because we chose to isolate our talent. And yet, we continue treating scientists’ passports as walls instead of bridges.

Of course, nations can choose to repeat H.S.’s expulsion endlessly, each time calling it protection, each time making themselves weaker. Or we can recognize what Roger Tsien understood in 2008, that a scientist’s origin is a bridge, not a border, and that true strategic advantage lies not in locking talent behind walls, but in the trust that allows it to move freely, collaborate across oceans, and solve problems no single nation can face alone; that science thrives in safety and freedom, not suspicion and surveillance; and that in a world of shared threats, from climate to conflict, the securitization of science is a cost we cannot afford.

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