Youlin Chen, an American seismologist detained in China for more than 600 days without trial, faces espionage charges that carry sentences up to life in prison, his wife and two hostage advocacy organizations disclosed this week.
Chinese state security officers arrested Chen, 54, at Beijing’s international airport on Nov. 5, 2024, as he prepared to fly home to Boston after visiting his parents and lecturing at two universities. His family stayed silent for 20 months. Now they’re talking.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Chen as wrongfully detained on March 19, a status the administration withheld from public announcement to leave room for direct diplomacy, Reuters reported. Chen is the only American in China who currently holds that designation, said Global Reach, a Washington nonprofit advising his family.
A public researcher facing a secret trial
Chen, a naturalized US citizen since 2011, works for a US government contractor on research funded by the State Department and the Air Force Research Laboratory. His published work examines the seismic signatures of North Korea’s six known nuclear tests and how to tell blast waves from earthquakes.
He has never held a security clearance. A December 2020 paper carries a State Department cover page marked “approved for public release.” Prosecutors formally charged Chen with espionage on May 1, 2025. Interrogators have questioned him more than 100 times about his detection work, said his wife, seismologist Yufang Rong.
She said early conditions included forced sitting on a stool for entire days and withheld diabetes medication, and that Chen has lost 30 to 40 pounds. “I have not been able to speak with my husband for over 600 days,” Rong said in a statement released through Global Reach. His Chinese lawyer first saw him after 13 months in custody.
The legal machinery behind the charge
The case rests on a secrecy regime Beijing rebuilt while Chen was still free. A revised Counterespionage Law took effect July 1, 2023, widening espionage to cover documents, data and materials “related to national security” without defining the term.
A revised Law on Guarding State Secrets followed on May 1, 2024, one year to the day before prosecutors charged Chen. Human rights groups argue the combined statutes let authorities retroactively classify open information as secret, exposing anyone who handled it.
Why that matters here
Chen’s research used publicly available Chinese data and was produced with Chinese academic collaborators, said Eric Lebson, a former US national security official advising the family through Global Reach.
Lebson believes Beijing wants Chen’s expertise in decoupling, a concealment technique in which a device is detonated inside an underground chamber to mute its seismic signal. In February, the Trump administration accused China of using the method to mask a low-yield nuclear test on June 22, 2020. Beijing denies the test occurred.
The three weeks Washington’s warning missed
Chen was already in custody on Nov. 27, 2024, when Beijing released Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung, the three Americans then designated as wrongfully detained in China. By Nov. 30, the State Department had lowered its China travel advisory from Level 3 “reconsider travel” to Level 2 “exercise increased caution” and dropped the wrongful detention risk indicator. Beijing had seized its next American three weeks before Washington softened the warning.
The formal count remains narrow. The Foley Foundation believes at least 13 Americans are unjustly held in China, including citizens blocked from leaving under exit bans. The wrongful detention list, built on case reviews under the Robert Levinson Act, stands at one.
What a single designation conceals
President Donald Trump raised the case with Xi Jinping during a May state visit to Beijing, and Xi promised to look into it, Rong said she was told by the White House and State Department. Nothing moved.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said July 14 that judicial organs handle cases in accordance with the law and “there is no so-called wrongful detention.” Xi is expected in Washington in September, and Lebson said the case could figure prominently if it stays unresolved.
The exposure is not abstract. About 48% of Americans now hold passports, up from 5% in 1990, and American academics are taking posts abroad in larger numbers as US research funding contracts. Chen’s case shows the category of American most at risk in China: a scientist whose collaboration ran on open data that Beijing later chose to treat as secret. His trial has no public date. Rong expects a closed courtroom and a conviction.
