It was 1950. The US government detained Qian Xuesen and slapped him with a $15,000 bail, enough to keep a family comfortable for years. Caltech and his friends eventually scraped together the money. But to this day, the exact details of how it was raised and whether the bail was ever refunded remain murky.
That episode is part of what historians call the 'Qian Xuesen Mystery.' Today, we're grappling with a new riddle: Why couldn't America keep Yang Zhilin? Eighty years apart. You have to ask: what the hell kind of place is America, anyway?
Salakhutdinov, a Carnegie Mellon professor and AI research advisor, remembers it well. Yang Zhilin could have easily stayed in the United States, but he chose to return to China and start a business. So Yang came home. In 2023 he founded Moonshot AI, and its Kimi K3 model now rivals the best America has to offer.
Some eighty years ago, Qian Xuesen was a founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Then, suddenly, he was accused of being a spy and a member of the US Communist Party. He spent five years under house arrest before he was allowed to leave the US. In September 1955, he sailed back to China. There, he made monumental contributions to the nation's rocket, ballistic missile, and space programs. The most famous: the Dongfeng missile series. He changed China's destiny.
Why bring this up? Because Qian's work was about the tools of a great power. It's no exaggeration to say the next set of those tools is AI models. Their power lies in leapfrogging US technology, ensuring America can no longer single-handedly steer global development.
When Kimi K3 launched in July 2026, a Silicon Valley notable asked a pointed question: Why didn't Yang Zhilin stay in the United States? The post exploded, racking up 7.47 million views in four days. The reality is, Yang's choice is far from unique. In recent years, top AI talent has been flowing back from the US to China.
The Economist crunched the numbers for NeurIPS, a premier AI conference. The share of authors from China jumped from 29% in 2019 to 51% in 2025. Over the same period, the US share slid from 20% to 12%. Meanwhile, a US survey revealed that 73% of Chinese-American scientists feel unsafe as researchers, and 65% fear hate and violence against Asians.
China's tech sector isn't just attractive. It's lucrative. The data backs it up: China's AI ecosystem is gaining appeal in capital, policy, market size, and application scenarios）. Riding the Kimi K3 wave, Moonshot AI closed four funding rounds in the first half of 2026, pulling in over $3.9 billion.
Salakhutdinov put it bluntly: The US didn't lose someone who was forced out. It lost someone who simply didn't want to stay. Yang's return to China underscores a hard truth. If America insists on decoupling from China, the price tag keeps climbing. Right now, the US still leads in AI infrastructure like semiconductors and data centers. But talent is the real engine of AI development. And there, America's disadvantage may be far worse than it thinks.
The Cost of Xenophobia: America's Self-Inflicted Wound
The Nikkei highlights another gravitational pull: the IPO dream. If Moonshot AI and DeepSeek can list in mainland China or Hong Kong, they will become new entrepreneurial icons. That could accelerate the trend of Chinese AI talent chasing success at home rather than in the United States.
Some in the US venture capital community are already urging a course correction. They argue America should be rolling out the red carpet for Chinese talent, including helping their families relocate.
Instead, the industry sees the Trump administration's chaotic anti-China policies for what they are: a self-defeating campaign of 'driving talent away.'
Postscript: Forget the 'Qian Xuesen mystery.' The real puzzle is the 'American mystery.' A New York Times article from June 5 last year, titled 'The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, in a Decision That Changed World History,' tore into the Trump administration. It reported that Secretary of State 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.'".
Consider the scale: the United States hosts one million foreign students. More than 250,000 of them are Chinese.
Qian Xuesen was unreasonably treated by the US government and finally had to leave. America learned nothing. Now, beset by troubles at home and abroad, instead of striving to improve, it reaches for xenophobia as a weapon.
And yet the United States still sees itself as the world's strongest. A real unfathomable mystery!
Deep Blue
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
What is China? It is a demon-revealing mirror. Hold China up against the United States, and the demons rooted in America have nowhere to hide. I did not buy it at first, but Friedman convinced me. In his latest piece for The New York Times, he lays it out plainly.
The Demon-Revealing Mirror
"In my view, the Chinese today are getting the best out of a bad system of government — by thinking long-term and executing on a plan to align their country with the economic trends of the 21st century.
But one of the weaknesses of China's system has been on dramatic display lately: the sudden disappearance and arrests of senior officials accused of corruption — so many that it could start to slow down the whole system here, if high-level bureaucrats fear making spending decisions that could land them in jail. Or as one Chinese economist put it to me, quoting a Chinese proverb: "If the water is too clear, there will be no fish."
And America? By doing no long-term thinking, appointing incompetent cabinet secretaries and having each new administration undo major initiatives of the previous one — like on clean energy — we're getting the worst out of a good system."
A laureate writer, bending logic the way you twist a Rubik's Cube. He takes a jumbled, mismatched set of squares and turns them, twist by twist, until a neat all-frontal pattern appears. I have not read widely, but AI does not lie to me. Scan Friedman's past articles and the picture is simple: he has written about China for thirty years, back and forth, yet the core never changes. He uses China to examine America.
His view of China, though, has shifted. Not from pro-China to anti-China, and not the other way around. He simply picks China up as a demon-revealing mirror and raises it toward America from time to time. He looks once, twice, three times. Look long enough, and he finally sees it: the celebrated superiority of American democracy and the myth of economic freedom are, in fact, magic cast by demons.
"Just look around. Trump is savaging America's scientific research budget and driving away the most talented foreigners who want to come to America to work, study and invent. Trump gutted the electric car industry in favor of gas guzzlers, while Democrats did not think it was a bad idea to leave our southern border porous, which helped to get Trump re-elected."
One could put it this way. The American demon is not President Donald Trump, nor the MAGA crowd; the ingredients are far more complex than that. As the Doctrine of the Mean in the Book of Rites puts it: "When a state is about to flourish, there must be auspicious omens; when a state is about to perish, there must be demons." Let me be clear upfront: I am not the one forcing the demonization of America. I am merely noting that ominous signs are indeed in the air right now.
Twisting the Rubik's Cube, turning black into white. AI current-affairs cartoon
Twisting the Rubik's Cube
However you slice it, Friedman writes with a magic touch. America gets a light tap, while China gets the knife: "If China were a person, it would have the upper body of an Olympic weight lifter — rippling with muscles that represent its export-driven advanced manufacturing economy — and the lower body of an Olympic skier who just crashed into a mogul, broke his leg and can now only hobble on a crutch."
Why the broken leg? "That lower body represents a domestic Chinese economy that is still so weakened by the explosion of its large, quarter-century-long housing bubble — which ravaged its middle class and left hundreds of millions of people with mortgages that are underwater or with wiped-out savings — that many Chinese are holding tight to every yuan they can.
I see the trick now. Friedman's long piece circles and circles to do one thing: twist out an America that is neat and white on top and a China that is uniformly black below. With that sleight of hand, he turns the demon-revealing mirror into a Rubik's Cube. Please applaud.
After the applause comes the landing. Friedman argues: "The only way we will restore some balance to the economic relationship between China and America (and between China and Europe) is not by begging Beijing but by rebuilding our leverage — by being serious again about our governance, by making cost-competitive products and by planning beyond next week and then executing on those plans."
Read it closely, and the whole closing passage sounds less like strategy than a muffled cry of despair.
Comfort in a Cube
No wonder Friedman treats China as part of the same Rubik's Cube as the United States. Honestly, if my own country were like America, I too would throw everything into twisting it right again.
Even a paper exercise in tallying gains and losses would bring some comfort. Two hundred years ago, China was exactly like this.
