Held in 16-pace windowless room with two guards keeping constant watch
WASHINGTON — President Trump is expected to raise the case of Min Zin, an American scholar detained in China for more than three months on espionage allegations, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a Washington summit planned this month, U.S. officials said.
Min Zin, a Myanmar-born naturalized U.S. citizen and University of California, Berkeley graduate, was detained on June 3 after stepping off China Eastern Airlines Flight 9640 at Kunming airport in Yunnan province, according to a family spokeswoman. He had traveled from Chiang Mai to attend a three-day academic workshop on economic cooperation at the invitation of a Chinese professor.
The Chinese government has alleged Min Zin engaged in espionage, a charge his family and U.S. officials deny. “Min Zin was lured to China by official government organizations and entrapped by Chinese security services. The accusations against him are completely unfounded,” a State Department spokesperson said. Liu Chang, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., said Min Zin has been subject to “criminal coercive measures,” meaning he is under investigation. Min Zin’s “legitimate rights have been fully guaranteed,” he said.
Min Zin is being held under what China calls “residential surveillance in a designated location,” a system criticized by United Nations human-rights bodies as opaque. Chinese law permits authorities to hold a suspect under such conditions for up to six months before any arrest or charge. According to the family spokeswoman, Min Zin is being held in an unknown location in a small windowless room about 16 paces long, with lights that never turn off and up to two guards keeping watch. He isn’t allowed to go outside and gets no sunlight, the spokeswoman said, citing information relayed through the U.S. consulate. Each day he is interrogated for around four to six hours, sometimes longer. Just one day — July 4 — brought a break from interrogation.
The case first surfaced through a trail of unanswered messages. Min Zin stepped off his China Eastern Airlines flight on the afternoon of June 3 and sent his family a text: “Just landed in Kunming.” He also sent messages to colleagues and to the Chinese professor who had invited him. “Landed, bro,” his text to the professor at 12:32 p.m. said, according to a screenshot viewed by The Wall Street Journal. When Min Zin did not respond, the professor called him multiple times and wrote, “please send a message when you come out. I am at coffee.” WeChat, the app they used, does not show whether the message was received or read. By evening, the family was growing worried. The hotel Min Zin had booked said he had never checked in. At 10:52 p.m., Min Zin’s iPhone location showed the device in the Lianran district of Anning, Kunming — about 40 miles southwest of the airport. A few minutes later, the location information disappeared.
The following evening, on June 4, his wife, Sylvia Zin, received a call from a Chinese phone number. Between the heavy accent and unclear audio, she caught some words — “compulsory preliminary investigation” and a possible reference to the “Ministry of State Security,” China’s primary intelligence agency. When she asked whether Min Zin was detained, the caller hung up. On June 5, the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou confirmed to the family that Min Zin had been detained in Yunnan province on allegations he had endangered national security.
The family was shocked by the seriousness of the charge, his brother Aung Maw Zin said. He recalled Sylvia asking: “What should I tell my daughter?”
In three months of detention, Min Zin has met with a U.S. consulate official three times for 30 minutes each in a hotel conference room with Chinese officials present. They are not allowed to discuss his case. The family believes he is in otherwise decent physical condition, though he has reported knee pain, the spokeswoman said. When he is not being interrogated, Min Zin spends several hours a day meditating and has not seen or spoken with his family or received letters.
Min Zin studies Myanmar’s democratization and ethnic conflicts — topics that could be sensitive in China given the two countries’ close ties. He participated in protests against Myanmar’s military in 1988 and over the years has received U.S. government grants for his research, the family spokeswoman said. U.S. officials do not know exactly why he was detained, but they believe his background as a former student activist and his U.S.-funded academic work may have drawn the attention of Chinese security services.
He had previously traveled to China for academic work without incident, including a Chinese-government-supported conference in October 2025, the spokeswoman said. The professor who invited him for the June workshop had written in messages viewed by the Journal: “We will have many things to talk [about] and you will see some very important persons,” and “[P]lease come with big smiles and happiness!” The professor did not respond to requests for comment.
Min Zin is one of two Americans the State Department has designated wrongfully detained in China. The other is Youlin Chen, a Beijing-born American seismologist held since November 2024 on espionage charges his family and the U.S. government deny. The families of both hope the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting will lead to their release. After Trump met with Xi in Beijing in May, China released Christian pastor Ezra Jin, a Chinese national with family members in the U.S.
U.S. options to press Beijing include heightened travel warnings for Americans going to China or designating China as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention,” which could trigger new economic sanctions and export restrictions. Trump has publicly shown little appetite for confronting Xi directly in recent months, focusing instead at his last summit on the Iran war and foreign investments.
“We’re talking about the fact that a foreign government sees value in arresting Americans—people with [an] American blue passport—and using them to arrange trades or concessions or leverage,” said Eric Lebson, chief strategy officer of Global Reach, a nonprofit that works to bring home Americans detained wrongfully or kidnapped. “Their crime is that they are American citizens.”
The Wall Street Journal wrote that the case “highlights how China’s all-powerful state security system enforces opaque laws in unpredictable ways that raise risks for U.S. passport holders, all while Beijing works to court foreign investors, academics and tourists.” The paper also wrote that the case “underscores how U.S. ties with China are fraying over detentions, trade clashes and geopolitical tensions even as Trump works to curry favor with Xi as a fellow superpower leader.”