Power of Collective Action
Yongyi Song
Editor’s Note: Yongyi Song, a librarian from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, was released from jail in China in January, after having been detained since August 1999. Chinese officials had accused Song, whose research focuses on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of unlawfully removing documents bearing state secrets from the country.
To the AAUP:
I am finally home in Pennsylvania following six months of incarceration in China and isolation from the free world. How sweet are home and freedom!
With tears in my eyes, I read the first organizational petition letter in my support from all of my AAUP colleagues dated September 29, 1999. Some of them I know personally, others I don’t know; but they all came to my aid in a time of crisis.
The AAUP petition letter is not an ordinary letter. It is a declaration of academic freedom by American professors at the end of the twentieth century. It is a successful embodiment in academe of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Without the petition letter, without the rescue effort by Dickinson College, the State Department, lawmakers in Congress, and friends from all over the world, my academic career would have ended in a dark jail cell. The AAUP’s efforts have not only rescued an ordinary researcher like me, but they have also rescued and defended the dignity of international academic freedom and basic human rights.
No words in any dictionary can adequately express my gratitude. I will therefore offer a simple yet most sincere thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I will work hard to live up to the expectations of my colleagues and to continue my research on China’s Cultural Revolution. The road ahead will be long and bumpy, but I am determined to dedicate the rest of my life to the establishment of a Cultural Revolution Memorial Museum and the building of a Cultural Revolution database. I will give my utmost to these projects so that future generations will know the complete truth about Chinese history, and so that a catastrophe similar to the Holocaust will not repeat itself again in human history.
Yongyi Song
(Library Science)
Dickinson College
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