AIDS Researcher at UAB, Wife Detained by Chinese Officials

The Birmingham News

09/12/00

An AIDS researcher from UAB who traveled to China last week to be with his dying father was temporarily detained by authorities who found Falun Gong material in his luggage.

Friends of Shean Lin, who is completing work on a Ph.D. in microbiology, said Lin and his wife, Xiaohua Du, were temporarily detained after they arrived in Fuzhou in southern China.

Friends say the two were released to attend the funeral of Lin's father, but authorities expect to interrogate them again soon about the Falun Gong material both were carrying.

"I don't know what will happen next," said Wei Wu, a Chinese graduate student in chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a friend of Lin's, as well as a practitioner of Falun Gong. "I hope they can come back soon."

Falun Gong, a system of meditation and exercise drawn from Buddhist and Taoist teachings, has been banned in China, where authorities consider it a cult and a threat to security. Practitioners say it is simply a way for individuals to improve their spiritual and physical health.

Friends say Lin has been a practitioner for several years and met Xiaohua Du, whom he married in February, during a gathering of Falun Gong faithful.

Friends and colleagues have been getting information about Lin and his wife through Lin's aunt, an American citizen who went with the couple to China. Lin and his wife are Chinese citizens. Xiaohua Du, who has a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, works in Atlanta for Siemens Corp.

Eric Hunter, director of UAB's Center for AIDs Research and Lin's Ph.D. adviser, expressed guarded optimism about Lin's chances to return to UAB. He said authorities in southern China have not been as concerned with Falun Gong as authorities in the north have been.

"It was one of our fears that something might happen," Hunter said. "He has been active in that group in the states and it's difficult to know how much information gets back to China. One of our concerns as a lab group was that he might be putting himself in danger. We weren't aware that they were carrying any materials relating to Falun Gong going back to China ... although presumably that was the reason they were detained in customs."

Hunter described Lin, who has been in Birmingham about seven years, as a "very generous, thoughtful, fairly quiet individual but very committed to Falun Gong.

"I think it's fair to say that when he embraced Falun Gong a few years ago, it did change him as a person," Hunter said. "He became much more focused on his work and really took the whole belief process ... and focused it to become a better researcher, I think."

Hunter said that Lin has been "looking at the entry of the AIDS virus into cells and had developed a novel approach to studying how the virus interacts with its target cells. ... He's given us a very powerful technique to try to understand in the finest detail how HIV gets into cells and I'm sure that his approach is going to be used in blocking that step of the virus' life cycle."

In the spring of 1999, after a protest by Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing, Lin wrote a letter to The News in which he defended the belief system's teachings.

"Falun Gong's teaching emphasizes 'truthfulness, benevolence and forbearance,'" he wrote. "Moreover, practitioners are not involved in any politics."