Having displayed their irrepressible talent for cultivating comical levels of hysteria, certain students and groups on campus might finally want to subdue their obsession with sanctions against Iraq and instead start wondering why China held an American citizen captive for 26 days, without explanation and without his parents.

If this consideration is too impotent to merit worry, consider also that this American citizen was probably especially impacted by the absence of his parents; that is, if this citizen is like any other five year-old.

The five year-old, Andrew Xue, is the son of Gao Zhan, a Chinese scholar at American University who, because of fictitious evidence, and while visiting relatives in China, was charged with espionage against her homeland (Gao is officially a citizen of China, but has permanent residence in America).

Gao denied the absurd charge, so, according to Robert Kagan, a columnist for the Washington Post, her son’s suffering “was meant to force a confession.”

The Chinese “took him away from his parents. They told him nothing about where his parents were, what had happened to them, or whether he would ever see them again.”

The treatment of Andrew and his family is not an anomaly in Chinese behavior. Actually, it could be argued that young Andrew was treated with a surprising gentility.

Kagan writes that when China is in the mood to torture, “It ties [people] up by their arms or upside down by their ankles and beats them with wooden poles. It listens to them howl, watches them bleed and keeps on beating them.” Oh, and sometimes “it beats them to death”-which, by that time, must be wonderful.

Andrew and his father have been released back to the United States, but Gao will now stand trial for a crime she did not commit in a country that presupposes guilt. Every day, the likelihood of her conviction creeps toward certainty.

The only way, perhaps, to elevate Gao’s chance of victory is to pass a law granting her U.S. citizenship.

Senator George Allen has already drafted legislation to make it so. It now needs approval by the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The timing, as always, is spectacular: Right after the Chinese announced their nonsense against Gao, they decided to invent fresh mischief by “detaining” 24 American servicemen and women who were forced to make an emergency landing in China after the American spy-plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in mid-air.

As this article is written, the Chinese are setting their country ablaze with the usual propaganda: it’s America’s fault. Their plane hit ours. The U.S. was exercising hegemony. The U.S. was in our air space.

And so on and so forth. It’s all drivel.

Many in the United States would simply like to vomit and move on. But even if the Chinese do stumble upon the moral sense and free our men and women, the deeper sickness of Chinese human rights abuses will still dominate the Chinese government-just like it always has.

And that’s why groups on campus pursuing good causes should calm their exuberance over America’s faults and notice the world.

On the surface, college students can do nothing to change China. But, it should be recalled, the current crop of students will someday hitch their accumulated experience to global dilemmas.

Today’s growing perceptions become tomorrow’s towering paradigms. The guy in your business class may some day be recruited by the President to formulate trade policy; and the girl in your business class may be that President. In any case, grappling with these issues as students will help create, or improve the quality of later solutions.

Probably for quite some time, and despite the disaster of the 1960s, colleges have been efficient producers of balanced patriotism.

And, for the most part, that’s fine: it’s good for students to ask critical questions and to realize that America, like all great parents, has its faults.

But, please: there are problems in the world other than sanctions against Iraq or the School of the Americas that are equally deserving of hysteria. That’s not to say that sanctions or the School should be permanently put aside, but it is to say that the time has arrived to turn our energies to other good causes.

Start with China.

Matt Emerson is a freshman majoring in political science and theology.