China’s Transnational Repression Is Being Met With a Deafening Silence

This article was originally published in World Politics Review. Joshua Kurlantzick’s research includes the militarization of politics in Asia and around the world, China’s relations with Southeast Asia and other developing regions, the rise of global populism and populism in Asia, and global democratic regression.

Here is what we know about how U.S. citizen Min Zin ended up in a Chinese detention cell: He accepted an invitation to attend an academic conference in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China. This was nothing unusual, as Min Zin is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent years writing about the politics of Myanmar—where he is from—and the country’s thorny relationship with China. The think tank he co-founded in 2016, ISP-Myanmar, has regular contact with Chinese academic institutions. He had traveled to China multiple times without incident.

None of that mattered. According to Scholars at Risk, which monitors attacks on academic freedom worldwide, Min Zin vanished on June 3, while traveling to the conference in Kunming. For more than a week, his family and colleagues had no idea where he was or whether he was safe. Then, on June 11, The New York Times reported that he had been arrested in Kunming. Hours later, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing confirmed Min Zin’s arrest on suspicion of “engaging in espionage and endangering Chinese national security.”  

The espionage charges do not appear to hold up. Min Zin had a history of activism against Myanmar’s military. He took part in Myanmar’s 1988 pro-democracy uprising as a high school student—a movement the military crushed with lethal force. The activism got him expelled from school. He spent years in hiding to avoid arrest, eventually crossing into Thailand in 1997. He made it to the United States, applied for asylum, and rebuilt his life.

More recently, Min Zin’s research covered civil-military relations, democratization and ethnic conflict—the standard portfolio of a political scientist specializing in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. His think tank, which was located in Myanmar during the country’s democratic opening, moved to Thailand after the 2021 military coup that ushered military rule back in.

But ISP-Myanmar also ran a dedicated China Desk publishing detailed analyses of Chinese infrastructure investments in Myanmar and Beijing’s backing of the military government. That last part, along with his history of activism, is almost certainly what got him arrested. Not espionage, but scholarship that Beijing found inconvenient.

In an earlier period, this arrest would have been shocking. Today, it remains troubling but is sadly unsurprising. The reach of Chinese authorities has become so extensive, and the costs Beijing bears for detaining foreign citizens and operating beyond its borders have become so low, that cases like Min Zin’s are now the norm, even for U.S. citizens.

China is far and away the world’s leading practitioner of transnational repression. Freedom House has confirmed 319 physical incidents linked to Beijing since 2014—nearly a quarter of all documented cases worldwide. And those are just the cases with a verifiable paper trail; the real number is much higher. Beijing’s expansive toolkit includes digital surveillance of diaspora communities and threats against exiled dissidents’ family members who are still in China. Beijing’s Operation Fox Hunt, a campaign nominally aimed at rooting out corruption, has been used to pressure exiled dissidents into returning home—or, in some cases, into taking their own lives.

A 2022 investigation by the nonprofit Safeguard Defenders identified over 100 covert Chinese police “service” stations operating in more than 50 countries, including the United States, which are used to monitor and intimidate overseas Chinese communities. The report found that some 230,000 people were pressured to return to China between April 2021 and July 2022.

Indeed, what is happening to Min Zin is not unusual: It is one piece of a large and sophisticated system. Last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published an investigation that painted a detailed picture of how Beijing’s transnational repression operates. ICIJ researchers reviewed internal Chinese security documents and interviewed more than 100 people who had been targeted by Chinese authorities in 23 countries. The people reported that Chinese police had gone after their family members back in China after they spoke out overseas. Sixty of them believed they were under surveillance. Twenty-two said they had received physical threats or had been assaulted by people linked to the Chinese Communist party.

One of the main engines of this persecution is the United Front Work Department, a CCP body that, among other things, monitors Chinese students abroad and tries to ensure that diaspora organizations stay aligned with Beijing’s positions. The United Front’s reach into foreign universities has been extensively documented. A 2024 Amnesty International report found that roughly 900,000 Chinese students studying abroad live under persistent pressure, including being photographed at protests, watched on campus and sometimes reported on by fellow students—with the implicit threat that stepping out of line could bring trouble for their families back home.

Earlier, the arrest of a U.S. citizen on Chinese soil would have been shocking. Today, it remains troubling but is sadly unsurprising.

China has also turned Interpol’s Red Notice system, the global police alert mechanism, into another tool for hunting critics abroad, getting foreign law enforcement to arrest dissidents on Beijing’s behalf under the cover of legitimate legal requests. The ICIJ has documented how Beijing pressured Malaysia to detain and deport Abdulhakim Idris, a U.S. citizen who heads the Center for Uyghur Studies, during a trip to promote a book about China’s persecution of the Uyghurs.

The ICIJ also found that China has packed the U.N. human rights system with dozens of fake civil society groups. These government-organized NGOs, or GONGOs, pose as independent civil society groups, but in reality they are charged with monitoring activists attending U.N. sessions and to shout down or disrupt criticism of Beijing.

When it comes to Min Zin’s arrest, the timing suggests that China wanted to test the White House and showcase its leverage against Washington. Min Zin disappeared just weeks after Donald Trump met with Xi Jinping in Beijing. Since then, the U.S. president has taken steps to accommodate Beijing. He has publicly called China a peer superpower, handing Xi a status that Beijing has spent years angling for. And Trump left the summit having raised serious doubts about U.S. commitments to Taiwan, keeping a $14 billion arms package for the island on hold and telling reporters that the fate of the weapons “depends on China.” That was a break from 40 years of bipartisan U.S. policy under which arms sales to Taiwan are not discussed with Beijing.

To be sure, China is not the only offender—just the biggest. Transnational repression is worsening around the world. According to a report published earlier this year by Freedom House, there were 126 new incidents of physical transnational repression in 2025 alone, bringing the total since 2014 to 1,375 confirmed cases across 107 countries. The number of governments doing this has jumped from 38 to 54 in just a few years. Six countries turned up as first-time offenders in 2025: Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Transnational repression used to be something only powerful states did. Now, even smaller states are doing it too, mainly because they have seen others do it with impunity.

In many cases, authoritarian governments are working together to hunt down exiles and dissidents. For instance, Thailand has turned itself into a regional clearinghouse, with its security services coordinating with Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese counterparts to detain and deport people.

Democracies have pushed back in some ways, and those efforts deserve recognition. The G7 issued its first formal statement against transnational repression in June 2025, and Canada rewrote its criminal code to specifically target these operations.

But the Trump administration has done almost nothing to address the broad sweep of China’s actions, much less the specific case of Min Zin. There appears to have been no real conversation at the Trump-Xi summit in May about China’s operations against U.S. citizens. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China later warned that senior White House officials had been tasked with keeping other agencies from doing anything that could disturb the trade relationship with China, including pressure on human rights.

When asked by media outlets about Min Zin’s case, the State Department has only said it is “aware of reports regarding a U.S. citizen detained in China.”

What more can the United States do? Washington should demand Min Zin’s release via a public, explicit statement that arresting an American scholar for his research is unacceptable and will have consequences. More broadly, the United States needs to put transnational repression on the table in every serious exchange with China. After all, the FBI has said repeatedly that China’s covert operations on U.S. soil are genuine national security threats.

Washington also needs to start working with allies to impose actual costs for transnational repression. A good starting point would be targeted sanctions against the Chinese officials running these programs, tools the U.S. is already using against Iran and Russia. Finally, the U.S. government should give American academics and researchers honest guidance about what travel to China now means, especially for those studying topics that Beijing finds sensitive.

None of this has to mean starting a new Cold War or walking away from trade talks. There is a wide range of leverage that Washington could be using to protect its own citizens from the long arm of Chinese repression. Unfortunately, the United States is instead choosing to remain mostly silent.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.