> “He drove that collaboration but there is nothing to collaborate on now; he hasn’t been able to get any data,” says Holmes. > Holmes believes the lab closure

> “He drove that collaboration but there is nothing to collaborate on now; he hasn’t been able to get any data,” says Holmes. > Holmes believes the lab closure is part of an effort to sideline Zhang for unauthorized sharing of data. “It is heartbreaking to watch,” he says. “It is unfathomable to me to have a scientist of that calibre sleeping outside his lab.” > But Yanzhong Huang, a specialist in Chinese health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, says the true nature of the dispute and protest are “shrouded in mystery”. I guess we're supposed to infer that he got in trouble from the University and/or the CCP for sharing data in a way they deemed unacceptable, so they punished him by making it hard for him to get access to data. And that this lab closure is part of that larger punishment, if it's not just a coincidence caused by incompetence (which does exist at both the University and Party level, to be sure). Sleeping outside the lab is almost certainly a form of protest. He won a $1MM prize a couple years ago, and is a respected researcher anyway. He must have either money, friends, or grad students who would let him sleep on the couch.