Min Zin’s freedom must be first on the Trump-Xi summit agenda

As the summit meeting between President Trump and China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping gets under way today, the first item on the agenda must be freedom for Min Zin, an American expert on Myanmar, who has been detained in China since June 3.   

Min Zin, 53, was already in China, if only barely, when he was arrested at the Kunming airport upon his arrival to participate an academic workshop. The Chinese government announced it was investigating him for “endangering national security.”

The charge is absurd and raises questions about why Beijing moved against him after he had previously visited China without incident.

Certainly, Zin has the kind of background autocratic regimes dislike. As a teenager, he participated in Burma’s pro-democracy protests of 1988. Although violently crushed by the military, the protests brought Burma’s democracy movement to international prominence and to the forefront of American policy toward the country. (Myanmar is the official name for the country although Burma, the anglicized version, remains widely used.)

Zin’s career has been in research and academia. After arriving in the U.S. he married, became a U.S. citizen and pursued a Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley.  

Like many other exiles, Zin returned to Burma when limits on the media, political activity and education were eased in 2011. He founded the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, one of the country’s first independent think tanks in 2016. However, when a military coup overthrew the elected government in 2021,........

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