China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday confirmed the arrest of Min Zin, a U.S. citizen and executive director of a Myanmar-focused policy think tank, on suspicion of espionage, a development that threatens to complicate Washington and Beijing’s fragile diplomatic rapprochement.

An American scholar who writes about Myanmar and Chinese foreign policy was arrested by authorities in China on suspicion of spying, China’s foreign ministry said Friday.

BANGKOK (AP) — An American scholar who writes about Myanmar and Chinese foreign policy was arrested by authorities in China on suspicion of spying, China’s foreign ministry said Friday.

The scholar, Min Zin, was suspected of “engaging in espionage activities that endanger China’s national security,” said China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lin Jian.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — China has arrested a U.S. citizen on suspicion of spying, the Chinese government said Friday.

Min Zin, who heads a think tank focused on his native country of Myanmar, was detained on arrival at Kunming airport in China’s southwest Yunnan province on June 3, according to sources including diplomats in the region who are familiar with the arrest. They spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, which they were not authorized to discuss.

Engaging In Espionage Activities…’: Beijing Nabs US Citizen On Suspicion of ‘Espionage’
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have flared after China confirmed the arrest of a US citizen on espionage charges. The detained scholar, identified as Myanmar political analyst Min Zin, is accused of spying and endangering Chinese national security. The arrest comes amid high-level diplomatic engagement between the US and China and ahead of Myanmar’s leader’s visit to Beijing. The case is likely to add a new layer of friction to already strained US-China relations.

Despite no immediate evidence that they were connected, the detentions of two vocal commentators on Myanmar triggered alarm in the business and research communities.

China’s foreign ministry confirmed on Friday the arrest of Min Zin, a U.S. citizen who leads a think tank focused on Myanmar, saying the American was suspected of spying and endangering Chinese national security.

မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရေးလေ့လာနေသူ အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံသား ဦးမင်းဇင်ကို နိုင်ငံတော်လုံခြုံရေး ထိခိုက်စေမှုစွပ်စွဲချက်ဖြင့် တရုတ်အာဏာပိုင်များက ဇွန်လအစောပိုင်း၌ ဖမ်းဆီးထားကြောင်း သံတမန်သတင်းရင်းမြစ်များကို ကိုးကားပြီး နယူးယောက်ခ်တိုင်းမ်သတင်းဌာနက ဇွန်လ (၁၁) ရက်၌ ဖော်ပြထားသည်။

မဟာဗျူဟာနဲ့ မူဝါဒလေ့လာရေးအဖွဲ့ (ISP-Myanmar) ရဲ့ အမှုဆောင်ဒါရိုက်တာ ဦးမင်းဇင်ကို တရုတ်အစိုးရက သူလျှိုမှုနဲ့ အမျိုးသားလုံခြုံရေးကို ခြိမ်းခြောက်မှု စွပ်စွဲချက်တွေနဲ့ ဖမ်းဆီးထိန်းသိမ်းလိုက်ကြောင်း ဒီကနေ့မှာ တရားဝင် အတည်ပြုလိုက်ပါတယ်။

BEIJING—China said Friday that it had detained an American citizen on suspicion of espionage and endangering national security, adding another point of friction between the countries just weeks after a summit between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China has confirmed the detention of Min Zin, a U.S. citizen and executive director of the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar (ISP-M), on suspicion of espionage and endangering national security. Min Zin was reportedly detained at Kunming Airport on June 3 while traveling to attend a meeting. Chinese authorities have notified the U.S. consulate of the case.

ISP-Myanmar တည်ထောင်သူနဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရေး လေ့လာသုတေသနပညာရှင်တစ်ဦးဖြစ်တဲ့ မြန်မာနွယ်ဖွား အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံသား ဦးမင်းဇင်ကို တရုတ်အာဏာပိုင်တွေက “နိုင်ငံတော်လုံခြုံရေး ထိခိုက်စေမှု” စွပ်စွဲချက်နဲ့ ဖမ်းဆီးထားတယ်လို့ သတင်းတွေ ထွက်ပေါ်လာပါတယ်။