Song Yongyi

Song Yongyi (Chinese: 宋永毅; born 15 December 1949) is a Chinese American historian who specializes in the study of Chinese Cultural Revolution. He currently works at the California State University, Los Angeles, and previously served as a college librarian at the Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
Biography.
Song Yongyi was born in Shanghai, China in December 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, Song became a Red Guard who followed Mao Zedong, but was jailed when he was 17 for several years because he was part of the "counter-revolutionary clique" that challenged Zhang Chunqiao.
After the Cultural Revolution, he was accepted into the Shanghai Normal University in 1977, when the National College Entrance Examination was resumed by Deng Xiaoping. He came to the United States in 1989 and obtained a Master of Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1992, and was awarded another master's degree at the Indiana University Bloomington in 1995.
In the summer of 1999, Song went back to China to collect documents related to the Cultural Revolution, but was arrested by the Chinese government for "stealing state secrets". More than 100 scholars and researchers called for his release. United States senators Arlen Specter and Matt Salmon intervened in the case and negotiated with Jiang Zemin, then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese President. Song was finally released from prison after more than 100 days.