A political scientist with ties to\u00a0UC Berkeley, has been arrested in China and accused of spying.<\/p>\n
The State Department confirmed that Min Zin, a United States citizen, was arrested during a trip to the Yunnan Province in southwestern China, and said that U.S. consular officers had visited him. He was arrested at a Kunming airport on June 3 after accepting an invitation from a Chinese academic institution, NPR reported<\/a>, citing anonymous sources.<\/p>\n Min Zin founded and leads a policy think tank focused on Myanmar, where he protested against the military as a teenager before leaving the country in 1997 to avoid arrest. A 2008 profile in the Jakarta Post reported<\/a> that Min Zin later applied for a master\u2019s degree in Asian studies at UC Berkeley. Despite having been expelled from high school because of his political activity, the university accepted him into the program, according to the Post.<\/p>\n Min Zin\u2019s LinkedIn profile also indicates he studied for a master\u2019s in political science at UC Berkeley from 2010 to 2016. A 2015 blog post<\/a> from UC Berkeley indicated he was a political science doctoral student at the time, though the university has not confirmed whether Min Zin is a student. He currently lives<\/a> in Thailand, according to the New York Times.<\/p>\n In recent years, Min Zin\u2019s think tank, ISP Myanmar, has published analyses on Myanmar\u2019s relationship with China. Experts say China, which sells<\/a> weapons and equipment to the Myanmar military, sees<\/a> its neighbor as an important trade connection with other parts of the world. The New York Times reported<\/a> that Chinese President Xi Jinping has invited Myanmar\u2019s president Min Aung Hlaing, who led a successful coup against the government in 2021, to visit China next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A political scientist with ties to\u00a0UC Berkeley, has been arrested in China and accused of spying. The State…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[7,3573,143,145,144,149,2013],"class_list":["post-359820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-california","tag-china","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-us-and-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}