Who Are the Americans Wrongfully Detained by China?

The U.S. State Department has publicly declared two Americans as being wrongfully detained by China just weeks before Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington.

“Wrongfully detained,” a designation created by legislation passed in 2020, means that the U.S. considers the person innocent, held for political reasons or subject to inadequate due process.

The first, a seismologist named Chen Youlin (陳有林), was arrested in November 2024 while on a trip to China to visit family and give lectures at two universities. Beijing accused him of espionage and prevented him from accessing a lawyer for the first 13 months of his detention, according to his wife. In a statement distributed to media in mid-July, the advocacy group Global Reach said there are suspicions in the U.S. government that Chen was detained over concerns that he was looking into Chinese nuclear tests. His previous work used seismological data to detect nuclear tests, focusing in particular on North Korea.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s wrongful detention of Dr. Youlin Chen is a stark reminder that academic engagement with China carries risks that extend far beyond the theft of intellectual property and research,” said Representative John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

The second wrongfully detained American in China, Min Zin, is a Myanmar scholar who was arrested in Yunnan Province in June while traveling to attend an academic workshop at the invitation of the Chinese government. Min Zin leads an organization called the Institute for Strategy and Policy — Myanmar, or ISP-Myanmar, which publishes analysis on Chinese infrastructure investments in Myanmar. He was charged with espionage and endangering national security.

Scholars at Risk, an organization that protects scholars and promotes academic freedom, expressed concern about the detention of Min Zin “in apparent retaliation for his exercising the right to academic freedom.”

“We humbly ask that the U.S. government continues to keep Min Zin’s case as a top priority, particularly ahead of President Xi’s visit to meet with President Trump next month,” ISP-Myanmar said in a statement. 

While Chen and Min Zin are the only two Americans formally labelled as wrongfully detained, China reportedly detains more Americans than any other foreign country. It’s not publicly known exactly how many, partly because the Chinese government does not publish a list of foreign detainees and partly because the families of those detained sometimes ask for their cases to be kept quiet. But the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group that holds direct dialogues with the Chinese government, estimates that over 200 Americans are “under coercive measures” by China, with 30 Americans subject to exit bans. 

Two of the most well-known cases are Dawn Michelle Hunt and Nelson Wells Jr., who have each been incarcerated for over a decade for drug-related charges that their families maintain are dubious. Both have been subject to brutal violence and severely declining health while in prison, according to their families.

“The most important lesson from all of it is that not a single American prisoner held in China has had a fair and transparent trial,” said Peter Humphrey, a former British journalist, sinologist and prisoner of China, during a 2024 hearing held by the Congressional-Executive Committee on China. “All of its organs — the police, the prosecution, the judiciary, the prisons and the Chinese lawyers — form a single organic whole, all controlled by the Communist Party.”