Qian Ji
Chinese physicist and aerospace engineer
Qian Ji (Chinese: 钱骥; 27 December 1917 – 28 August 1983) was a Chinese physicist and aerospace engineer who was instrumental in the development of China's first satellite, the Dong Fang Hong I, and its first successful 3-in-1 satellite launch, the Shijian 2. In 1999, he was posthumously awarded the Two Bombs, One Satellite Meritorious Medal.
Early life and career
Qian was born on 27 December 1917 in Jintan, Jiangsu, Republic of China. He studied at Wuxi Normal School (无锡师范学校) from 1935 until October 1937, when the school was destroyed by Japanese aerial bombing after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. As Jiangsu fell to Japanese occupation, Qian fled to Sichuan province, the centre of Kuomintang resistance during the war.
Qian graduated from National Sichuan High School in Beibei in 1938, and tested into National Central University, then exiled in Chongqing. Upon graduation in 1943, he was hired by the university as an assistant professor.
After the surrender of Japan, Qian was transferred in 1947 to the Institute of Meteorology of Academia Sinica in Nanjing, working as an assistant researcher under the renowned scientist Zhao Jiuzhang. When the Kuomintang lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan, Zhao and Qian both chose to stay in mainland China.
Satellite design
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Qian and Zhao worked for the Institute of Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which was relocated to Beijing in 1954.
“Qian Ji” enters the record as chinese physicist and aerospace engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Qian, Chinese and physicist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Qian Ji” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Qian, Chinese and physicist provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15941465. VIAF identifies the subject as 292979621. The Library of Congress control number is n2012078885. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1983, 1999 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Qian Ji” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.