China arrests American scholar Min Zin on espionage charges; analysts cite Myanmar research

Background

Min Zin, a U.S. citizen and doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted an invitation to attend an academic conference in Kunming, the capital of China's southwestern Yunnan province. The invitation was a routine matter—Min Zin has spent years researching Myanmar's politics and its fraught relationship with China. The think tank he works for maintains regular contact with Chinese academic institutions, and he had traveled to China many times previously without incident.

Disappearance and Arrest

According to Scholars at Risk, which monitors violations of academic freedom worldwide, Min Zin went missing on June 3 while en route to the conference. For more than a week, his family and colleagues had no information about his whereabouts or safety.

On June 11, The New York Times reported that he had been arrested in Kunming. Hours later, Beijing's Foreign Ministry confirmed that Min Zin had been detained on suspicion of "engaging in espionage activities and endangering China's national security."

The Charges

The espionage charges appear flimsy. Min Zin's research covers civil-military relations, democratization, and ethnic conflict—standard topics for a political scientist specializing in Southeast Asia.

The think tank he co-founded in 2016, ISP-Myanmar (Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar), relocated to Thailand after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. Min Zin also has a history of activism against Myanmar's military junta. As a high school student, he participated in Myanmar's 1988 democracy uprising—a movement crushed with lethal force by the military. This led to his expulsion from school. He evaded arrest for years, hiding out until crossing into Thailand in 1997, from where he made his way to the United States, applied for asylum, and rebuilt his life.

ISP-Myanmar operates a dedicated "China Desk" that publishes detailed analyses of China's infrastructure investments in Myanmar and Beijing's support for the Myanmar military junta. The latter content, combined with his activist background, is almost certainly the reason for his arrest. What got him into trouble was not espionage, but academic research that Beijing found inconvenient.

China's Transnational Repression

In the past, such an arrest would have been shocking. Today, while still disturbing, it is sadly unsurprising, given how widespread China's transnational repression has become. The reach of Chinese authorities has extended so far—and the cost to Beijing for detaining foreign nationals and operating abroad is so low—that cases like Min Zin's have become routine, even for U.S. citizens.

Key Statistics

• Freedom House has identified 319 physical incidents linked to Beijing since 2014—nearly a quarter of all documented cases globally. These are only cases with a verifiable chain of evidence; the real number is much higher.
• A 2022 investigation by Safeguard Defenders found that over 100 covert Chinese police service stations operate in more than 50 countries, including the United States, used to monitor and intimidate overseas Chinese communities. Between April 2021 and July 2022, approximately 230,000 people were pressured to return to China.
• China is by far the world's leading practitioner of transnational repression.

Methods and Tools

Beijing's vast toolkit includes:

• Digital surveillance of overseas diaspora communities
• Threats against family members still in China
• Operation Fox Hunt—nominally aimed at combating corruption, but used to force exiled dissidents to return to China, in some cases driving them to suicide
• Interpol's Red Notice system—turned into a tool for hunting down critics abroad, using legitimate legal requests as a pretext to have foreign law enforcement arrest dissidents on Beijing's behalf

The United Front Work Department (UFWD)

One of the main engines driving this system is the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department. Its functions include:

• Monitoring Chinese students abroad
• Ensuring diaspora organizations align with Beijing's positions
• Infiltrating universities

A 2024 report by Amnesty International found that approximately 900,000 Chinese students studying abroad live under constant pressure—being photographed at protests, monitored on campus, and sometimes reported on by classmates—with the implicit threat that stepping out of line could cause trouble for their families back home.

Documented Cases

Last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published an investigation detailing how Beijing's transnational repression operates. Researchers reviewed China's internal security documents and interviewed over 100 people in 23 countries who had been targeted by Chinese authorities. These individuals reported that after they spoke out overseas, Chinese police contacted their family members back home. Among them:

• 60 believed they were under surveillance
• 22 said they had received physical threats or had been attacked by individuals linked to the Chinese Communist Party

The ICIJ also documented how Beijing pressured Malaysia to detain and deport Abdulhakim Idris, a U.S. citizen and head of a Uyghur research center, while he was on a tour to promote a book about China's persecution of Uyghurs. Inside the United Nations in Geneva, the ICIJ found that China has planted dozens of fake non-governmental organizations within the human rights system. These government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) masquerade as independent civil society groups but are tasked with monitoring activists attending UN meetings and attempting to shut down or disrupt criticism of Beijing.

Timing and Political Context

In the case of Min Zin's arrest, the timing suggests China intended to test the White House and demonstrate its leverage over the United States. Min Zin disappeared just weeks after Donald Trump met Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Since that meeting, the U.S. president has taken a series of steps to accommodate Beijing:

• Publicly referred to China as a superpower on par with the United States
• Raised serious doubts about whether the U.S. would uphold its commitment to Taiwan
• Shelved a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan
• Told reporters the fate of the weapons "depends on China"

This marked a departure from four decades of bipartisan U.S. policy, which held that arms sales to Taiwan were not subject to negotiation with Beijing.

A Global Trend

China is not the only perpetrator—just the largest. Transnational repression is on the rise globally.

According to a report released earlier this year by Freedom House:

• 126 new physical incidents of transnational repression occurred in 2025 alone
• Total number of confirmed cases since 2014: 1,375 across 107 countries
• Number of governments engaging in such behavior: jumped from 38 to 54 in just a few years
• Six countries identified as first-time perpetrators in 2025: Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe

Transnational repression used to be the domain of powerful states. Now, even smaller governments are doing it, largely because they see others doing so with impunity. In many cases, authoritarian governments are cooperating to hunt down exiles and dissidents. Thailand, for example, has turned itself into a regional "transit hub," with its security services collaborating with counterparts in China, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to detain and deport individuals.

Response from Democracies

Democracies have pushed back in some areas, and these efforts are commendable:

• The G7 issued its first formal statement against transnational repression in June 2025
• Canada amended its criminal code to specifically target such actions

However, the Trump administration has done almost nothing about China's broad campaign, let alone Min Zin's specific case. At the Trump-Xi summit in May, there appears to have been no substantive discussion about China's actions against U.S. citizens. According to Real Clear Politics, the Trump administration has tasked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with ensuring that other federal agencies do not take actions that could undermine the trade truce, such as pushing human rights issues.

When asked about Min Zin's case, the U.S. State Department only said it was "aware of reports that a U.S. citizen has been detained in China."

What More Can the U.S. Do?

Washington should:

1. Issue a public, unequivocal statement demanding Min Zin's release, making clear that arresting an American scholar for academic research is unacceptable and will carry consequences
2. Put transnational repression on the table in every serious engagement with China—the FBI has repeatedly stated that China's covert operations on U.S. soil are a real national security threat
3. Work with allies to impose real costs for transnational repression, including targeted sanctions against Chinese officials running these programs—tools the U.S. already uses against Iran and Russia
4. Provide honest guidance to American scholars and researchers about what traveling to China now entails, especially for those studying topics Beijing considers sensitive

None of this has to mean starting a new Cold War or walking away from trade talks. Washington has a wide range of leverage it could use to protect its citizens from the reach of China's repressive apparatus. Unfortunately, the U.S. has chosen largely to remain silent.

This article was translated into Chinese by Claude Sonnet 5. The translation has been internally reviewed.

This article represents the views and opinions of the author alone. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher that takes no institutional position on policy issues.