Song Yongyi

Song Yongyi was born in Shanghai, China in December 1949.[1][8] 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.[2][3][8]

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.[8] 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.[8][9][10]

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".[1][8][11][12] More than 100 scholars and researchers called for his release.[8][12] 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.[3][5] Song was finally released from prison after more than 100 days.[4][5][8]

• Yongyi Song; Dajin Sun; Eugene Wu (1998). The Cultural Revolution: a bibliography, 1966-1996. Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University. ISBN 978-0-941128-06-3.
• Song Yongyi; Zhou Zehao. Heterodox Thoughts During the Cultural Revolution, Parts I and II, Contemporary Chinese Thought 32, no. 4 (Summer 2001); 33, no. 1 (Fall 2001)
• Jian Guo; Yongyi Song; Yuan Zhou (2006). Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5461-1.
• Song Yongyi (2011). CHRONOLOGY OF MASS KILLINGS DURING THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1966-1976). Sciences Po.
• Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, Yuan Zhou (2015). Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and Civil Unrest). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.