A US federal court in New York announced on Tuesday that it sentenced a former General Electric employee to two years in prison following his conviction on charges of spying for China, the second such sentencing in several weeks involving espionage that sought to gather the company’s proprietary turbine technology.
Zheng Xiaoqing, 59, was convicted of conspiracy to commit economic espionage following a four-week jury trial that ended in March last year. He was convicted with Zhaoxi Zhang, a businessman based in China’s Liaoning province, over a plan to take millions of dollars’ worth of GE trade secrets. Zhang was not mentioned in Tuesday’s statement.
Zheng was employed at GE Power in Schenectady, New York, as an engineer specialising in turbine sealing technology, the US Justice Department said, adding that he had been with the company for 1o years ending in the summer of 2018.
“The trial evidence demonstrated that Zheng and others in China conspired to steal GE’s trade secrets surrounding GE’s ground-based and aviation-based turbine technologies, knowing or intending to benefit the [People’s Republic of China] and one or more foreign instrumentalities, including China-based companies and universities that research, develop, and manufacture parts for turbines,” it said.
The Justice Department has continued to aggressively target suspected espionage originating in China, even after abandoning its ‘China Initiative’, a programme launched under former US president Donald Trump to fight intellectual property theft that officials saw undermining national security.
The focus has led to multiple convictions, including one that followed an “unprecedented extradition” of an individual sentenced in November to 20 years in prison, but also wrongly targeted some individuals, who have sought redress.
1,400 US-based ethnic Chinese scientists left American institutions for mainland20 Oct 2022
In the extradition case, Xu Yanjun – identified as a senior officer with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) – was the first Chinese spy extradited to the US for trial. He was convicted in 2021 on charges of plotting to steal trade secrets from several US aviation and aerospace companies, including GE.
In 2019, a federal grand jury charged a Chinese national in a hacking campaign described by the Justice Department as “one of the worst data breaches in history”, an effort that harvested the personal data of 78 million people.
The Justice Department has dropped charges against many individuals connected to China, such as Chinese-American physicist Xi Xiaoxing, giving ammunition to critics who have said the focus had become racially motivated and damaging for members of the Chinese community in the US.
The department also had to drop charges against Gang Chen, a Chinese-born mechanical engineer and nanotechnology expert at MIT, who was arrested in 2021 for allegedly failing to disclose links to the Chinese government.
scmp.com