Reuters, 20 Nov 09: The United States is seeking the release of Chinese-born, American geologist Xue Feng, who was detained two years ago on state secrets charges after negotiating the purchase of an oil industry database.

The following is a chronology of cases involving ethnic Chinese executives of foreign companies and Chinese-born, overseas-based academics, reporters and dissidents charged with stealing state secrets, espionage or other crimes.

March 1996 – An official of the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp was detained for leaking state secrets to a Chinese employee of Royal Dutch Shell who was released after spending a year largely incommunicado. Shell was in talks with CNOOC then to build an oil refinery.

October 1996 – China freed a Chinese employee of Swiss-owned SBC Warburg, detained for one month on suspicion of leaking state secrets, apparently for having helped prepare materials for company clients on the trend of China’s currency, the yuan.

November 1999 – Australian businessman James Peng, held in a Chinese prison for six years, was released on parole and deported. He had been abducted from a hotel in Macau in October 1993, spirited across the border to China and sentenced in 1996 to 18 years in jail on bribery charges.

January 2000 – Song Yongyi, a Pennsylvania-based scholar and expert on China’s chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, was released after five months in a Chinese prison on charges of gathering state secrets. He has since become a U.S. citizen.

July 2001 – Li Shaomin, a Hong Kong-based U.S. professor, was convicted of spying for Taiwan, but spared a sentence and released after spending five months in custody. The conviction came one day after Beijing won its bid to host the 2008 Olympics.

July 2001 – Gao Zhan and Qin Guangguang, Chinese academics with U.S. permanent residency status, were sentenced to 10 years in prison each for collecting intelligence for Taiwan. They were released days later ahead of a visit to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

February 2003 – A Chinese court sentenced dissident Wang Bingzhang, a permanent U.S. resident, to life in prison on charges of terrorism and spying for Taiwan after he stole into the country and was caught.

May 2004 – A Chinese court handed Boston-based scholar Yang Jianli a five-year prison sentence for entering China illegally and spying for Taiwan in a case that drew U.S. congressional attention and triggered widespread criticism abroad.

August 2006 – Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong reporter for Singapore’s Straits Times, was jailed for five years for spying for Taiwan. He was paroled in February 2008, six months before Beijing hosted the Olympic Games.

November 2008 – China executed Wo Weihan, a businessman accused of spying for Taiwan, despite a last-ditch effort by his daughters to appeal for clemency through diplomatic channels. Wo had lived in Germany and Austria for many years. His ex-wife and daughters are Austrian citizens.

July 2009 – Four employees of Australian miner Rio Tinto were detained for stealing state secrets shortly before a deadline for acrimonious iron ore price negotiations. They were later formally arrested for stealing commercial secrets, and the investigation was recently extended into mid-January.

They included Stern Hu, an Australian national and Rio Tinto’s top iron ore salesman in China.

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From the archives:
Is China Spooked?
Just about any visitor can look like a spy to the Beijing government

By Dr. Paul D. Moore
Washington Post op-ed
August 2001

The writer was the FBI’s chief analyst for Chinese intelligence for more than 20 years.

One of the problems the FBI and other U.S. counterintelligence agencies have long had with attempting to neutralize Chinese intelligence-collection operations in the United States is that the people who covertly gather intelligence for China normally don’t look like spies, act like spies or pilfer large amounts of secret information. Curiously, it is this exact aspect of Chinese intelligence practice that is driving the recent spate of arrests and convictions of U.S. researchers in China.

For most areas of Chinese intelligence collection, the actual work of locating and obtaining desired information, even very sensitive data, is carried out by academics, students, businessmen or journalists. Chinese intelligence officers typically do not direct or control the effort, because it is Chinese intelligence consumers who determine the nature and extent of Chinese collection operations, just as it is U.S. consumers whose purchases shape the U.S. economy.

Since they are not intelligence professionals, Chinese collectors do not understand or make use of clandestine techniques such as “dead drops” under pedestrian bridges in parks; instead they tend to rely on simply sitting down with a knowledgeable friend or contact and asking confidentially for information or assistance. The normal consumer collects information for his own use or for his immediate co-workers, so his collection goals are very modest. Even when a collector pilfers sensitive or classified information, it is normally in small pieces.

U.S. counterintelligence has a great deal of trouble with China’s consumer-driven approach to intelligence collection because U.S. defenses were built with the idea of stopping the Soviets, whose operations typically are run by intelligence officers who look like intelligence officers, act like intelligence officers and are ambitious collectors of a large volume of high-quality U.S. secrets.

Chinese counterintelligence has encountered the same problem as the United States, but in a different form. While the United States anticipates that its espionage adversaries will act the way the Soviets did in their heyday, Chinese counterintelligence assumes that China’s adversaries will collect inside China just the way China collects abroad.

There are too many visitors to China to investigate everyone, so it seems to me that China has been searching out individuals with a Taiwan connection of some sort and putting them under much closer scrutiny than others. This would be a natural thing to do, because people with close Taiwan ties are considered to have a built-in motive for spying against the People’s Republic of China.

In Chinese counterintelligence eyes, the professors, graduate students, journalists and businessmen who arrive in China in ever-increasing numbers for activities other than tourism look like natural spies. When subjected to counterintelligence scrutiny, their normal professional relationships with colleagues and friends as they go about the process of collecting information for research projects or news stories can look sinister. Most telling, when they attempt to collect information from academic or professional journals to obtain data for their research projects, they can easily cross the line into what China considers “state secrets,” because China has a much lower threshold for deciding what is classified, especially when the data find their way into foreigners’ hands.

As far as China is concerned such visitors look like spies, act like spies and are collecting state secrets, probably for Taiwan. It seems clear to me that Chinese officials see their country being overrun by this phenomenon and have made a strong enough case about it to require that action with political consequences be undertaken. In this string of espionage arrests, security is driving politics, not vice versa.

It appears to me that the standard of training for U.S. academics, which has come to involve collecting information to plug into ever more sophisticated analytical models, has clearly intersected the standard for reasonable suspicion by Chinese counterintelligence. One man’s data are another’s state secret, nowadays. American scholars are being arrested, tried and convicted of espionage for the simple reason that their work meets China’s definition of what a spy is, what a spy does and what information a spy collects. It looks like a major internal security problem for China; and it is an issue that will not go away anytime soon.