Washington D.C. – CBS News, Sept. 23, 2026
For over 100 days, Sylvia Zin has not been allowed to see or speak with her husband Min Zin, a U.S. citizen and scholar whose work focuses on Myanmar. She says he is being held without charge in China at a detention facility that is referred to by human rights groups as a “black site.”
In an interview with CBS News, Sylvia Zin shared that the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, has not formally charged him with a crime nor given him a trial date.
“He’s not a spy”
“They just said he’s under investigation for endangering national security. That’s all we know,” she tearfully explained. “He’s not a spy. He’s not doing anything wrong.”
She shared the terror of the first hours of Min’s disappearance. His last message to her was a brief text on June 3 to tell her that he had landed in the Chinese city of Kunming. He had traveled there from his home in Thailand for an academic conference at the invitation of a Chinese professor. That night, Sylvia Zin received calls from Min Zin’s worried colleagues.
“We started calling the immigration, the luggage — you know — carousel at the airport where he landed, the professor that invited him to see what happened to him,” Sylvia Zin said. “He didn’t check into the hotel, and so we knew, like, he was missing.”
