The State Department on Thursday designated an American scholar arrested in China on spying charges in June as having been wrongfully detained.
The detained U.S. citizen, U Min Zin, disappeared in China’s Yunnan province after traveling there to attend an academic conference at the invitation of the Chinese government, according to the State Department.
“We call on Beijing to release all U.S. citizens arbitrarily detained or exit banned in China,” Dylan Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for global affairs, wrote on social media. “The safety and security of U.S. citizens is the State Department’s top priority.”
The official designation comes about a month before President Trump is expected to host President Xi Jinping of China for an official visit, following Mr. Trump’s trip to Beijing this spring.
It also comes as U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region have grown increasingly concerned about the United States’ willingness to help defend them against China and its partners, after Mr. Trump and the Pentagon recently scaled back major military exercises with South Korea.
Mr. Min Zin is a political scientist and the executive director of a strategy and policy group founded in Myanmar, though it moved its headquarters after a 2021 military coup in that country, formerly known as Burma. The Chinese province where he was detained borders Myanmar.
Mr. Min Zin, who was living in Thailand, has written on the politics of Myanmar for the opinion section of The New York Times, among other U.S. news organizations.
His arrest took place less than two weeks before President Min Aung Hlaing of Myanmar made a five-day visit to China, and less than three weeks after Mr. Trump’s state visit to Beijing.
Since returning to the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has adopted a warmer stance toward China, in pursuit of what both Trump and Xi administration officials have labeled “constructive strategic stability” between the two economic and military powerhouses. Mr. Min Zin’s arrest has complicated that trajectory.
He is currently one of two U.S. citizens in China to have been officially declared by the State Department as wrongfully detained. The other, Youlin Chen, a seismologist, was detained at a Beijing airport in 2024 while trying to return to the United States.
Under statute, the U.S. government is obligated to treat people it declares as wrongfully detained abroad as hostages of a foreign government and to work to secure their release. The cases are referred to the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and congressional committees are notified and periodically updated.
Dr. Chen’s family said this year that Mr. Trump pressed his case with Mr. Xi when the two leaders met in Beijing.
The group Mr. Min Zin led, the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, praised the State Department’s move and urged the Trump administration to make his detention “a top priority, particularly ahead of President Xi’s visit to meet with President Trump next month.”
“This designation also reaffirms that independent, open-source researchers and academics should be able to conduct their work without fear of intimidation or arbitrary detention,” the group said in a statement.
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