Collective Action Helps Detained Scholars
Writing a letter to protest an unfair situation can feel like a futile gesture, but recent events in China show the power of the pen. Researchers who were detained in China say that the public outcry of scholars and others helped win their eventual release.
The AAUP was at the forefront of protests when Song Yongyi, a librarian from Dickinson College, was detained in China for several months in 1999. The Association wrote repeatedly to the Chinese ambassador in Washington urging Song's release. In addition, staff members issued e-mail alerts and contacted members of Congress and U.S. State Department officials on Song's behalf. After Song returned to the United States, he said that the collective action of the academic community had been critical in persuading the Chinese government to let him go, and he has solicited scholarly support for subsequent efforts on behalf of imprisoned researchers.
One such effort was an open letter signed earlier this year by more than seven hundred China studies specialists and addressed to the president of China, Jiang Zemin. The letter urged him to release several scholars whom China had recently imprisoned or to allow them to defend themselves in a court of law with international standards of due process.
In another academic effort, more than 250 Princeton University students, faculty, and staff signed a petition addressed to a Chinese official that asked him to look into the case of Li Shaomin, a professor at the City University of Hong Kong who had earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1988. Li, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was convicted of espionage and deported from China but subsequently allowed to resume his teaching post in Hong Kong.
A group of academics at Oxford University wrote a separate letter, asking the Chinese ambassador to England to provide information about Xu Zerong, who was awarded an Oxford doctorate in 1999 and who has been detained in China since summer 2000. Chinese officials have not announced why Xu is being held.
Such letters tend to be effective not because the Chinese government is particularly attuned to the desires of scholars, but because of a snowball effect, according to Song. "When professors write letters, maybe the Chinese government doesn't care," Song says. "But the media care. Congress cares. Other Western democracies care. And so eventually the Chinese government does care, because it needs money and regard from the West. You may not have an army at your disposal, but you have your own voice."
See the July-August 2001 issue of Academe for more information about the detentions.
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