A month after Trump told China’s leader that Americans were spying \u201clike hell\u201d on the country, a scholar at UC Berkeley, who fled Myanmar in the ’90s, was arrested in China on suspicion of espionage.<\/p>\n
Min Zin, an American political scientist and Myanmar policy scholar with ties to UC Berkeley, has been detained in China on suspicion of espionage, as the Associated Press reports<\/a>. <\/p>\n Min Zin is reportedly a longtime Myanmar democracy activist who fled the country in the 1990s after participating in the 1988 pro-democracy movement and later receiving asylum in the United States. According to the New York Times<\/a>, he now serves as executive director of a Myanmar policy research institute and has spent years working between the US, Myanmar, and Thailand. <\/p>\n He\u2019s also a Ph.D. candidate in political science at University of California-Berkeley, where his research has focused on civil-military relations and political transitions, and he\u2019s written extensively on Myanmar\u2019s post-coup conflict and China\u2019s role in the region.<\/p>\n China\u2019s Foreign Ministry said Min Zin was arrested on suspicion of \u201cengaging in espionage activities that endanger China\u2019s national security.\u201d The AP reports that a Burmese activist familiar with Min Zin said he disappeared June 3 after traveling to Kunming in Yunnan province for a conference, noting that he had visited China previously without incident.<\/p>\n