Harvard Faculty Letter to the Chinese Ambassador

Harvard Faculty

Ambassador Yang Jiechi
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
2300 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20008

Dear Ambassador Yang:

We are writing as faculty of Harvard University to express our concerns about the detention in China of Dr. Jian-Li Yang, who recently received a Ph.D. from our university. Dr. Yang was detained in Kunming on April 26 as he was concluding a ten-day visit to China. He has remained in custody since that time.

Dr. Yang is an accomplished scholar and a long-time United States resident. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife and two children, who are United States citizens. In addition to his wife and children, Dr. Yang’s elderly parents and two sisters live here in the United States. Dr. Yang received a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and has undertaken important work in both fields. He is involved in ongoing research projects at Harvard, which focused on formal models of voting systems.

As you know, Harvard University has enjoyed deep and long-standing ties with the People’s Republic of China. Many of your citizens are graduates of Harvard. In addition, Harvard has numerous ongoing programs and exchanges with Chinese universities and your government. These relationships were strengthened with a recent visit of the President of our University, Lawrence Summers, and an extensive delegation, to China a few months back.

It is in this spirit of cooperation that we ask your government, as a humanitarian gesture, to do everything in its power to facilitate Dr. Yang’s immediate release so he can return home to his family in the U.S. We want to make sure Dr. Yang’s detention does not interfere with our strong partnership that we hope will continue to flourish in the years to come.

Respectfully,

The undersigned are representative of the widespread support and concern at Harvard University for Dr. Yang. They are members of the Committee awarding Dr. Yang his Ph.D. Unless otherwise indicated, they are Kennedy School of Government faculty members.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Dean, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy

Christopher Avery
Professor of Public Policy

Mary Jo Bane
Thorton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management

Robert H. Bates
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Iris Bohnet
Assistant Professor of Public Policy

L. Jean Camp
Associate Professor of Public Policy

Francesco Caselli
Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

William Clark
Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science,
Public Policy and Human Development

Cary Coglianese
Associate Professor of Public Policy

David Cutler
Professor of Economics
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

John Donahue
Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy

David Ellwood
Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy

Jane E. Fountain
Associate Professor of Public Policy

Peter Frumkin
Associate Professor of Public Policy

Edward Glaeser
Professor of Economics
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

William W. Hogan
Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration

Sheila Jasanoff
Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies

Christopher Jencks
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy

Joseph P. Kalt
Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy

Steven Kelman
Albert J. Weatherhead III and
Richard W. Weatherhead Professor of Public Managment

David Laibson
Professor of Economics
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Katherine Newman
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Urban Studies

Anne Piehl
Associate Professor of Public Policy

Robert D. Putnam
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy

Kenneth A. Shepsle
George Markham Professor of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Robert N. Stavins
Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government

Monica Duffy Toft
Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Richard Tuck
Professor of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Richard Zeckhauser
Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy

Sanjeev Khagram
Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Suzanne J. Cooper
Lecturer in Public Policy

Torben Iversen
Professor of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Roderick MacFarquhar
Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

David Wise
John F. Stambaugh Professor of Political Economy

Please address any response to this letter to Dean Joseph Nye, Jr. at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, and he will distribute it to the signatories.

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Source: "ChinaEWeekly".