China’s Transnational Repression Is Being Met With a Deafening Silence

Here is what we know about how U.S. citizen Min Zin ended up in a Chinese detention cell: He accepted an invitation to attend an academic conference in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China. This was nothing unusual, as Min Zin is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent years writing about the politics of Myanmar—where he is from—and the country’s thorny relationship with China. The think tank he co-founded in 2016, ISP-Myanmar, has regular contact with Chinese academic institutions. He had traveled to China multiple times without incident.

None of that mattered. According to Scholars at Risk, which monitors attacks on academic freedom worldwide, Min Zin vanished on June 3, while traveling to the conference in Kunming. For more than a week, his family and colleagues had no idea where he was or whether he was safe. Then, on June 11, The New York Times reported that he had been arrested in Kunming. Hours later, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing confirmed Min Zin’s arrest on suspicion of “engaging in espionage and endangering Chinese national security.”  

The espionage charges do not appear to hold up. Min Zin had a history of activism against Myanmar’s military. He took part in Myanmar’s 1988 pro-democracy uprising as a high school student—a movement the military crushed with lethal force. The activism got him expelled from school. He spent years in hiding to avoid arrest, eventually crossing into Thailand in 1997. He made it to the United States, applied for asylum, and rebuilt his life.