News staff writer

10/24/00

After being unable to leave China for nearly two months largely because of authorities' concerns over their Falun Gong beliefs, UAB AIDS researcher Shean Lin and his wife, Xiaohua Du, are happily back on American soil.

But their happiness is tempered by concerns about many of their fellow Falun Gong practitioners in China who lack the support that Lin and his wife had in America.

"We're still ... very, very worried about our practitioners in Beijing and other parts of China," Lin said Monday in a telephone interview. "... They all depend on themselves."

Lin a 30-year-old Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at UAB, and his wife, who has a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and is an employee of Siemens Corp. in Atlanta, landed in New York late Sunday night.

The couple flew to the southern Chinese city of Fouzhou in early September to be with Lin's dying father. But the two Chinese citizens were temporarily detained by authorities after Falun Gong material was found in their possession.

Over the next 40 days, Lin said, Fouzhou police interviewed him and his wife five times, told them to be available whenever they wanted to talk to them and, initially at least, told them they could put them in jail. While Lin and his wife could not tell if police had them under surveillance, "they were fully aware of what we were doing every day," Lin said.

Falun Gong is a system of meditation and exercise drawn from Buddhist and Taoist teachings. Practitioners say it is simply a way for people to improve their spiritual and physical health. But it has been banned in China, where authorities consider it [...] and a threat to security. The U.S. State Department has cited reports that thousands of practitioners have been tortured and jailed.

Lin said official Chinese hostility toward Falun Gong was evident in the types of questions police asked him and his wife.

"They wanted to know if Falun Gong is a big organization," Lin said. "... They wanted to know if our trip was carefully arranged. They had the wrong impression that Falun Gong is an organization that is trying to overthrow the government. They have this impression because of the Chinese government propaganda."

Lin said the way in which he and his wife responded to police questions was in keeping with their Falun Gong faith.

"They have a lot of impressions that Falun Gong practitioners are crazy," Lin said. "... We very calmly and peacefully talked with them every time. We never argued with them. We never criticized them ... and we told them we understood they were just following orders."

As they talked with police and wondered what awaited them, efforts were being made on their behalf at home. Those efforts took the form of petition drives, news media articles and lobbying by the State Department and federal lawmakers including U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Vestavia Hills. Lin said those efforts bore fruit, because police seemed "shocked so many people ... were helping us."

Because of the overseas interest in the case, and his and Xiaohua's efforts to show the nonthreatening nature of Falun Gong, the authorities' attitude softened somewhat over time, Lin said. By late September, he and his wife had their passports back and their airline tickets. All that remained was getting U.S. visas.

On Saturday morning, when they expected to leave Beijing's airport on the first leg of a flight back to the United States, customs police took Xiaohua's passport and detained the two of them for questioning. After about three hours and what Lin believes to have been some conversations with higher authorities, police let them go to take a later flight.

"I think the police in Beijing customs, they have met Falun Gong practitioners in the past," Lin said. "They know Falun Gong practitioners are good people and they can't force us to give up our beliefs."

Lin said that unwillingness to give up their beliefs - and to share them with family and friends who may have had a propaganda-influenced view of Falun Gong - was what prompted him and Xiaohua to bring the Falun Gong material into China in the first place.

"This risk was worth taking," he said.

The couple was slated to fly into Atlanta on Monday night and attend a reception there tonight at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.

http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/Oct2000/24-e422089b.html