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.” The U.S. citizen and Myanmar scholar was on a three-day trip in western China to take part in a workshop on economic cooperation, according to a family spokeswoman.
His family hasn’t heard from him since.
When Min Zin landed, he was swiftly detained at the airport. The Chinese government says he engaged in espionage, allegations that both his family and U.S. government deny.
In the months since, the University of California, Berkeley, graduate has been cloistered in a small, windowless room estimated to be only 16 paces long with lights that never turn off and two guards who keep constant watch over him, the spokeswoman said. The Trump administration declared him wrongfully detained and has called on Beijing to release him. Min Zin has yet to be formally arrested or charged.
Now, Min Zin and other detainees in China are expected to be on the shortlist of issues President Trump will raise with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this month when the two meet for a summit in Washington, officials said.
His 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.
{{/usCountry}}His 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.
{{/usCountry}}It also 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.
“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 that Min Zin has been subject to “criminal coercive measures,” which means he is under investigation. Min Zin’s “legitimate rights have been fully guaranteed,” he said.
U.S. officials still aren’t certain exactly why Min Zin was detained, but they believe his background as a former student activist in Myanmar and U.S.-funded academic work may have drawn the attention of Chinese security services.
Min Zin, who was born in Myanmar before moving to the U.S. and becoming a naturalized citizen, has studied Myanmar’s democratization and ethnic conflicts—topics that could be sensitive in China given the two countries’ close ties. He also was a political activist who took part in protests against Myanmar’s military in 1988. Over the years, his research has been funded by U.S. government grants at various points, the family’s spokeswoman said.
Yet he previously traveled to China for academic work with no issues, including a conference supported by the Chinese government in October 2025, she added. So when Min Zin was invited by a Chinese professor to attend a workshop on economic cooperation in June in southwestern China, his family wasn’t concerned.
“We will have many things to talk [about] and you will see some very important persons,” the Chinese professor who invited Min Zin said, according to a screenshot viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “[P]lease come with big smiles and happiness!”
On the morning of June 3, Min Zin took China Eastern Airlines Flight 9640 from Chiang Mai to Kunming, a two-hour flight. It was supposed to be a three-day trip.
Upon arrival, Min Zin sent messages to his family, colleagues and the professor. “Landed, bro,” his text to the professor at 12:32 p.m. said, according to a screenshot viewed by the Journal.
Shortly afterward, Min Zin’s communications went silent. After waiting for more than an hour, the professor called Min Zin multiple times. “Are you OK?” the professor asked. He waited for a few more hours, according to screenshots shared with the Journal. After 4 p.m., the professor wrote “please send a message when you come out. I am at coffee.” The app they used, WeChat, doesn’t show whether the message was received or read.
By evening, Min Zin’s family grew worried. It didn’t appear that he viewed the numerous and increasingly urgent phone messages his wife and colleagues sent him. The hotel Min Zin had booked said he never checked in. His colleagues contacted the professor, who said he had no information of Min Zin’s whereabouts.
The professor didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At 10:52 p.m., Min Zin’s iPhone location showed that the device was in the Lianran district of Anning, Kunming—about 40 miles southwest of the airport. A few minutes later, the location information on Min Zin’s phone disappeared. By the next morning, on June 4, his family and colleagues were frantically hunting for any information.
That evening, his wife, Sylvia Zin, received a call from a Chinese phone number. Between the heavy accent of the caller and unclear audio, she caught some words—“compulsory preliminary investigation” and a possible reference to the “Ministry of State Security”—which is China’s primary intelligence agency. When she asked whether Min Zin was detained, the caller hung up. She called back the number but couldn’t get through.
The following day, on June 5, Sylvia received a confirmation from the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou: Min Zin had been detained in the province of Yunnan. Chinese authorities alleged he had endangered the country’s national security.
The family was shocked to learn of such a serious charge. His brother, Aung Maw Zin, said he remembers Sylvia asking him: “What should I tell my daughter?”
Min Zin is now held in an unknown location under what China calls “residential surveillance in a designated location,” according to the family spokeswoman. The system, criticized by the United Nations’ human-rights bodies as opaque, is used by authorities to hold a suspect for interrogation in a secret location before any arrest or charge. The law in China permits authorities to hold an individual for up to six months.
What the family knows is in line with experiences of others who went through residential surveillance, including the small, windowless room lighted 24 hours a day with only a bed and a toilet. Up to two guards are in the room with him at times.
He isn’t allowed to go outside and gets no sunlight. Each day, he is interrogated for around four to six hours, sometimes longer. Just one day—on July 4—he got a break from the interrogation, said the spokeswoman, relying on information provided to the family through the U.S. consulate.
When he’s not being interrogated, he spends several hours a day meditating. He hasn’t seen or spoken with his family or received letters, the spokeswoman said.
In his three months of detention, Min Zin met with the U.S. consulate’s official three times in a hotel conference room for 30 minutes as Chinese officials looked on. They aren’t allowed to talk about his case.
Min Zin appears to be in decent physical condition, though he has said he suffers knee pain, she said.
Currently, Min Zin is one of the two Americans the U.S. has designated as unjustly detained in China. Both are academics. Youlin Chen, a Beijing-born American seismologist, has been detained since November 2024 on claims of espionage charges that his family and the U.S. government deny.
The families of Min Zin and Chen hope the Trump-Xi meeting will lead to their release. After Trump met with Xi in May in Beijing, China released a Christian pastor named Ezra Jin, a Chinese national with family members in the U.S.
U.S. options to try to force Beijing’s hand include heightened warnings against traveling to China or designating the country as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention,” which could lead to new economic sanctions and export restrictions. Trump, however, has publicly shown little appetite for confronting China’s Xi head on in recent months, instead focusing during his last summit on discussing 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.”
Write to Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com