In 1950, though it didn’t know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and M.I.T., he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America’s first guided ballistic missiles. He was made a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project and was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists. Dr. Qian wanted the first man in space to be American — and was designing a rocket to make it happen.

1950年，美国政府尚未意识到自己手中握着赢得冷战的其中一张王牌——钱学森。这位卓越的中国火箭科学家当时已为航空航天与武器技术带来革命性突破。在加州理工学院和麻省理工学院的学术殿堂里，他帮助解决了喷气推进的技术难题，研制出美国首批制导弹道导弹。这位被授予美国空军上校军衔的科学家曾参与绝密的曼哈顿计划，并被派往德国审讯纳粹科学家。钱学森博士希望第一个上太空的宇航员是个美国人——为此正全力设计新型运载火箭。

Then he was stopped short. At the height of his career, there came a knock at the door, and he was handcuffed in front of his wife and young son. Prosecutors would eventually clear Dr. Qian of charges of sedition and espionage, but the United States deported him anyway — traded back to Communist Beijing in a swap for about a dozen American prisoners of war in 1955.

然而命运急转直下。在事业的巅峰期，突如其来的敲门声打破了平静，他在妻儿面前被戴上手铐。虽然最终洗脱叛国罪与间谍罪指控，美国政府仍于1955年将他驱逐出境——用这位科学家交换了十几名朝鲜战争中的美军战俘。

The implications of that single deportation are staggering: Dr. Qian returned to China and immediately persuaded Mao Zedong to put him to work building a modern weapons program. By the decade’s end, China tested its first missile. By 1980, it could rain them down on California or Moscow with equal ease. Dr. Qian wasn’t just rightly christened the father of China’s missile and space programs; he set in motion the technological revolution that turned China into a superpower.

这次驱逐的影响令人震惊：钱学森博士回国后，立即说服毛泽东让他着手建立一个现代武器体系。在那个十年结束之前，中国试射了首枚导弹。到1980年，对中国来说将导弹射向加州已经和射向莫斯科一样轻松。钱学森博士不仅被恰如其分地誉为中国导弹和航天事业的奠基人，还启动了将中国转变为超级大国的技术革命。

His story has been top of mind for me (I’ve been working on a biographical book project on him for several years now) as we’ve watched the Trump administration ruthlessly target foreign students and researchers. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned up the pressure, announcing that the administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.” There are some one million foreign students in the United States — more than 250,000 of them Chinese. Dr. Qian’s deportation should serve as an important cautionary tale. It proved an American misstep, fueled by xenophobia, that would forever alter the global balance of power.

当我目睹特朗普政府对外国学生和研究人员展开严苛审查时，钱学森的故事一直萦绕在我心头（几年来，我一直在写作他的传记）。周三，国务卿鲁比奥加码施压，宣布政府将“大力撤销”中国学生的签证，包括那些与中国共产党有关联或是在“关键领域”学习的中国学生。美国有大约100万外国学生——其中超过25万是中国人。钱学森博士遭驱逐出境的往事堪称深刻教训：排外情绪催生的决策失误将永远改写世界格局。

In an echo of the current moment, he became a target of the hysteria around Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare because he was a Chinese national and a scientist. He was humiliated when his security clearance was revoked. The price paid for shunning Dr. Qian has been dear. Not only did the United States miss a chance to leapfrog the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight; it gave China the one resource it lacked to challenge American dominance in Asia: significant scientific prowess. In addition to closing that gap, his return to China ushered in generations of homegrown Chinese scientific breakthroughs. To this day, Washington spends billions of dollars on a nuclear umbrella shielding our Pacific allies from his technical achievements.

与当前时刻遥相呼应的是，当年钱学森因中国公民和中国科学家的身份而沦为了参议员约瑟夫·麦卡锡“红色恐慌”的牺牲品，安全许可遭撤销让他备受羞辱。美国为驱逐他也付出了惨痛代价：不仅错失载人航天领域超越苏联的机会，更让中国获得了挑战美国在亚洲主导地位所缺乏的一项资源——尖端科技实力。他的归国不仅填补了这一空白，也开启了中国持续几代人的科学突破。时至今日，华盛顿仍花费数十亿美元用于核保护伞，以保护我们的太平洋盟友免受他的技术成就的影响。

When asked about America’s deportation of Dr. Qian, the former Navy secretary Dan Kimball said, “It was the stupidest thing this country ever did.”

当被问及美国驱逐钱学森一事时，前海军部长丹·金博尔直言：“这是这个国家做过的最愚蠢的决定。”

1950年，美国政府举行移民听证会，决定是否应驱逐钱学森（左二）。

Dr. Qian came to the United States as a young man of 23. He benefited from a scholarship that now seems to represent a vanished mind-set: the idea that international educational exchange would promote American values and foster world peace. Edmund James, the American representative in Beijing, set up the fund that brought Dr. Qian and other students like him to the United States. “The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation,” Dr. James wrote to President Teddy Roosevelt, “will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.” By the 1960s, three-quarters of China’s 200 most eminent scientists, including future Nobel Prize winners, had been trained in America, thanks to Dr. James.

钱学森23岁赴美求学。令他受益的那个奖学金，如今看来代表了某种已不复存在的理念，即认为国际教育交流将促进美国价值观和世界和平。美国驻北京代表埃德蒙·詹姆斯设立了这个奖学金，资助钱学森等中国学子赴美深造。“哪个国家能够做到成功教育这一代中国年轻人，”詹姆斯博士在给西奥多·罗斯福总统的信中写道，“哪个国家就能因为这方面所付出的努力，而在道德、智力和商业影响力上获得最大的回报。”到20世纪60年代，中国200位最杰出的科学家中，有四分之三曾留美（一些人日后将获得诺贝尔奖），这都要归功于詹姆斯博士。

In California, Dr. Qian joined up with a group of other promising young scientists who called themselves the Suicide Squad, after at least one of their early experiments blew up a campus lab. At an annual meeting of engineers, two of the squad members announced they had worked out how to create a rocket capable of flying 1,000 miles vertically above the earth’s surface. Soon they acquired a more official name: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

在加州理工学院，钱学森与一群前途无量的年轻科学家组建起一个自称“自杀小队”的研究团队，起这个名字是因为他们当初做的一个实验曾将一个校园实验室炸毁。在一次工程师年会上，两名团队成员宣布他们已经研究出如何制造一枚能够垂直飞离地表1000英里的火箭。很快，他们有了一个更正式的名称：喷气推进实验室。

In 1949, Dr. Qian was chosen to lead the laboratory, which by then was the precursor to NASA. He not only wanted to help the United States win the space race, but he also unveiled plans to use rockets in air travel to allow passengers to get from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour.

1949年，钱学森博士被任命为该实验室的负责人，它是美国国家航空航天局(NASA)的前身。他不仅希望帮助美国赢得太空竞赛，还提出了火箭客运计划——设想用火箭技术将纽约至洛杉矶的飞行时间缩短至一小时以内。

Was Dr. Qian a spy? Was he a Communist? There was no convincing evidence of either, but it’s unclear whether the American government ever cared. Protests by top defense officials and academics, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with Dr. Qian on the Manhattan Project, went unheeded. After five years under house arrest, Dr. Qian was begging the Chinese government to help him escape the United States.

钱学森博士是间谍吗？他是共产党吗？始终缺乏确凿证据证明这两点，但美国政府是否真的在意，也不得而知。包括与钱学森博士在曼哈顿计划中合作过的J·罗伯特·奥本海默在内的国防部高级官员和学者的抗议都未被理会。在遭软禁五年后，钱学森博士恳求中国政府帮助他逃离美国。

State Department documents, now declassified, suggest that Dr. Qian had become a highly undervalued pawn in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, traded back to China for U.S. airmen. The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, speaking triumphantly about the negotiations, said: “We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.”

现已解密的国务院文件显示，艾森豪威尔政府严重低估了钱学森博士的价值，他被视为棋子，用于交换被俘虏的美国空军人员。中国总理周恩来在谈到谈判成果时得意地说：“但我们要回了一个钱学森，单就这件事来说，会谈是值得的，有价值的。”

Dr. Qian never returned to the United States and served the rest of his life as a celebrated leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He is seen as a national hero, too, with a museum built to honor his accomplishments. Most of his remarks in his later years were either technical documents or party propaganda against America. In 1966, however, one of his former Caltech colleagues received a postcard decorated with a traditional Chinese drawing of flowers and postmarked in Beijing. On it Dr. Qian had written simply, “This is a flower that blooms in adversity.”

钱学森博士此后再也没有回到美国，并且一直在中共党内担任要职。他也被视为民族英雄，并建有陈列他的成就的纪念馆。他晚年的大部分言论要么是技术文件，要么是反美政治宣传。然而，1966年，他的一位加州理工学院前同事收到了一张明信片，上面绘有中国传统的花卉图案，邮戳显示来自北京。钱学森博士在上面只写了一句话：“这是逆境中绽放的花朵。”

Mr. Rubio’s announcement, although short on details, has surely set off waves of anxiety among international students and their colleagues at research universities, as schools and laboratories brace themselves for further disruption. Something larger has been lost, though: America once saw educating the strivers of the world as a way to enhance and strengthen our nation. It was a strategic advantage that so many of the best and brightest thinkers, scientists and leaders wanted to study here and to be exposed to American democracy and culture.

鲁比奥的声明虽未详述细则，但无疑在国际学生和研究型大学来自海外的科研人员当中引发了焦虑，同时各高校和实验室都在为进一步的干扰做准备。然而，更大的损失已经发生：曾几何时，这个国家把教育全球英才视为增强国力的战略途径。当世界最杰出的思想家、科学家和领袖们争相来此求学并接受美国民主文化熏陶时，这本是我们无与伦比的战略资产。

Dr. Qian’s achievements on behalf of China demonstrate the risk of giving up that advantage and the potential dark side of alienating — rather than welcoming — the world’s talent. There’s always the chance that it will someday be used against us.

钱学森为中国做出的卓越贡献警示我们：放弃人才优势、选择排斥而非吸纳全球精英的做法，终将反噬自身。那些被拒之门外的才俊，终有一日可能成为我们的劲敌。