“Knowing the president’s historic record on bringing wrongfully detained Americans home has reassured me that he will also be able to secure the swift release of Min Zin,” Sylvia Zin told a House hearing on Wednesday. She was speaking to one man in particular. Trump is due to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping next week.
Min Zin, a University of California-Berkeley scholar of Myanmar politics and executive director of the think tank ISP-Myanmar, went to China in June for an academic workshop. State security detained him on suspicion of endangering national security, his wife said. That was more than three months ago. He is 53.
Visits that prove he is alive
Sylvia Zin has not been able to speak with her husband. She hears about him only from the US consular officials who visit. “So every month, we anxiously await his consular visits because they reassure us that he is alive,” she said. Through those officials she learned that he was at first interrogated for four to six hours a day, and that his small cell keeps the light on around the clock.
She told the House foreign affairs subcommittee for East Asia and the Pacific she had been in “a state of absolute shock” when she learned of the charge. His work, she said, is open-source research on Myanmar. “I’m trying to be strong for our daughter, but I’m constantly wondering if he’s OK and how to get him back home to us.”
The State Department lists Min Zin as one of two Americans wrongfully detained in China. The other is Youlin Chen, a Chinese-born American seismologist held for nearly two years. Both cases rank as a high priority in Washington’s dealings with Beijing. The Chinese Embassy did not answer a question on whether a deal for their release was possible. The White House has said Trump wants every American held abroad to come home.
Precedent, and Jimmy Lai
There is precedent of a sort. Trump raised the case of Ezra Jin Mingri, a Chinese pastor, with Xi during a state visit to China in May, and Beijing released him suddenly in July.
Jimmy Lai’s family was on Capitol Hill too. A Hong Kong court sentenced the former media mogul to 20 years in February under a Beijing-imposed national security law. Trump brought up Lai with Xi in May but later called it “a tough one.”
Lai’s son Sebastien asked a Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing to let his father “come home to his family and let him sit beside his daughter in her hardest moment.” Lai’s daughter Claire has cancer and began chemotherapy in London last week. Sebastien described his father as “a 78-year-old man who has already suffered enough,” and warned that if he is not freed soon, “he will most likely die in prison.”
