AS THE SCRAPBOOK goes to press, wire services are reporting that China has been detaining yet another American citizen, without charge or explanation, for more than a month. Li Shaomin, 44, a Princeton Ph.D. who currently holds a professorship at the City University of Hong Kong, walked from his home across the border to the neighboring Chinese city of Shenzhen -- with his U.S. passport -- on February 25, intending to visit a friend. He never arrived. Officials at the American embassy in Beijing were informed of Li's arrest at some unspecified later date. But the U.S. government has refused comment on the case, and Li's wife, Liu Yingli, has been refused all contact with her husband.
Earlier this month, of course, came news that another American citizen, a 5-year-old boy named Andrew Xue, had been held incommunicado from the U.S. embassy -- and from his parents -- for 26 days beginning February 11, when the family was detained at Beijing's airport. Andrew and his father have subsequently been released and reunited. But Andrew's mother, Gao Zhan, a political scientist at American University in Washington, D.C., remains under arrest on patently ridiculous espionage charges. Andrew's father reports that the boy now spends his days wailing over and over: "I want my mommy."
Surely the time has come for the United States, its government and its people, to get angry -- very angry.
American foreign policy experts and other deep thinkers now scratch their heads to divine what signal China's leaders might hope to send us by means of such unusual . . . diplomatic initiatives, as it were. For what it's worth, we would argue that it doesn't matter what signal China's leaders are sending. They are Communists, which more or less explains everything. The day after the Xue incident was made public, Chinese vice premier Qian Qichen, feted in Washington by the industrialists at the U.S.-China Business Council, put it quite well: "Chairman Mao is a great leader of the Chinese revolution. And this is the view of all the Chinese people." His audience applauded.
Twenty-four hours later, responding to questions from the Washington Post, Chinese president Jiang Zemin expressed incredulity that Americans might be distressed about the Xues. After all, Andrew and his parents were arrested -- which "means they must have violated the law to a certain extent." Besides, "the United States is the most developed country in the world in terms of its economy and its high tech; its military is also very strong. You have a lot of things to occupy yourself with." So "why do you frequently take special interest in cases such as this?"
This is the authoritarian mind: consumed with questions of power, and impatient with the "sentimentality" about individual liberties that a nation like the United States insists on as a matter of principle.
The key word here is "insists." We think it shouldn't matter much at all exactly why China has lately taken to making American citizens disappear in its dungeons. We think it should matter enough -- and only -- that it has been done. Where major world powers are concerned, the arrests without charge are virtually unprecedented in modern diplomacy. You may have to go back to the first decade of the 19th century, in fact, when England was impressing American merchant seamen into service in the British navy, to find the willingness and ability of the United States to guarantee the safety of its citizens traveling abroad so frontally challenged. The Xue and Li detentions are the acts of a rogue state. The Bush administration must recognize them as such.
As we write these words, the White House and State Department have not done more than issue cautious expressions of "concern" about Gao Zhan and Li Shaomin -- to go with quiet, back-channel protests to the Chinese foreign ministry. This timidity ill-suits American honor. A more appropriate response would be for the State Department to recall its Beijing ambassador for consultations. And for the president to order an immediate moratorium on bilateral contacts with China until Gao Zhan and Li Shaomin are set free.