Sunday, January 5, 2020: 11:10 AM
Gibson Room (New York Hilton)
Xiaoyue Luo, NYU Shanghai
In 1982, Arthur C. Clarke in his
2010: Odyssey Two named the Chinese spacecraft landing on Europa after Qian Xuesen (1911–2009, also known as Hue-Shen Tsien), a Chinese aerodynamicist. Indeed, Qian's career in the United States as the director of Jet Propulsion Center and a tenured professor at Caltech had prepared the ground for his professional reputation and his importance to Chinese space program. Four decades after he returned to China, in the 1990s, the Chinese public media began to honor him with the title 'father' of Chinese spaceflight. After his death in 2009, the Chinese public media overwhelmingly portrayed him as a patriotic, diligent, amiable, and humble model from whom Chinese citizens should learn. How did the Chinese public media present Qian? Why was Qian the one who became the 'father' among other contemporary space scientists and engineers returned from overseas? And what caused the transformation of China's foremost space celebrity over time?
Qian's persona integrates transnational knowledge moving from the United States to China with the pursuit of a rising China that lasted through the Republic of China (1911–1949) to the People’s Republic of China (1949–present). By analyzing newspaper articles, ego-documents and propaganda materials, this paper first articulates the rationale behind his transformation into a national model. Second, it examines Qian’s image-making in relation to Chinese politics since the hostility against the United States in the 1950s, to the strengthening of ideological regulation in the 1990s, and to the emphasis on national achievements on the fiftieth National Day in 1999. Ultimately, the paper argues that the incorporation of a transnational component into Chinese space achievements through Qian's persona enabled the Chinese political propaganda to foster a specific version of patriotism grounded in techno-nationalism between 1950 and 1999.
