Chinese authorities have arrested Yongyi Song, a Chinese researcher from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, for the "crime" of collecting documents on the Cultural Revolution. In response, more than a hundred Sinologists have signed a letter of protest, complaining that Song's arrest jeopardizes academic research and imperils exchange programs with the People's Republic.
THE SCRAPBOOK shares their indignation. But, of course, we wonder where many of these same scholars, such as Chinapologist Michel Oksenberg, former White House adviser on China policy and now a political scientist at Stanford, have been over the past year while China was busy rounding up hundreds of citizens whose great offense was practicing their faith. Or, for that matter, where the foreign policy "realists" among them were when Beijing's leaders decided to help prop up Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Belgrade with $ 300 million in new credit. It seems there is nothing like a threat to academic freedom to really raise the ol' scholarly blood pressure.