China rebukes spy charges
02/11/2010 Source: Global Times
China’s Foreign Ministry Tuesday brushed aside speculation of state-linked spying activities in the United States, calling the charges fabricated with a hidden agenda.
“Some people have always favored making up Chinese spy stories for sensationalism,” ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu told reporters in Beijing.
The remarks came as a US district judge sentenced Monday a Chinese-born former Boeing engineer to 15 years in prison for keeping classified documents at home and trading data related to aerospace and defense technologies to China, a ruling that the judge described as a signal to China to “stop sending your spies here.”
Dongfan Greg Chung, a naturalized US citizen and the first person convicted under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, denied passing sensitive information to China.
“I was planning to write a book. Those documents were going to be used for my reference,” said the 73-year-old engineer, who was born in China and lived in Taiwan before moving to the US in 1962.
US District Judge Cormac Carney said he handed down the sentence even without knowing exactly what information Chung passed to China, the AP reported. “But what I do know is what he did, and what he did hurt our national security, and it hurt Boeing,” the judge said.
Chung was arrested in September, 2006. He was convicted last year on charges of economic espionage and acting as an agent of the Chinese government for more than 30 years.
Investigators said they found 300,000 pages of documents with information on the space shuttle and military hardware such as the Delta IV rocket, the F-15 fighter, the B-52 bomber and the CH-46/47 Chinook helicopter. The FBI claimed that it also discovered letters, lists and journals detailing Chung’s contacts with Chinese officials.
Chung worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996 and stayed with the company until he was laid off in 2002, before being rehired a year later as a consultant, the AP reported.
Chung’s attorney, Thomas Bienert Jr, said at the trial that his client might have violated Boeing policy, which forbids employees with access to key data from taking documents out of the office, but he didn’t break any laws by doing so, and the US government couldn’t prove Chung had passed any restricted information to China, the AP reported.
Defense attorneys argued that much of the material was already available on the public record, the Los Angeles Times said. The attorney said his client would appeal, the AP said.
The sentencing seems to shed light on the overly guarded mentality adopted by the US with respect to China in high-tech issues.
Chen Liangyao, an information-engineering scholar at Fudan University, cited his personal frustration at meetings with US academics and complained that the US sets too many limitations on technological exchanges with its Chinese counterparts.
“US authorities remain skeptical of our civilian-purpose research,” Chen said.
Unlike many US companies, such as Boeing, that have both military and civilian operations, most Chinese companies and academic institutions have no connection with the military, Chen added.
A senior Chinese aerospace expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said academic exchanges with European counterparts are much smoother than those with the US.
“The US (side) seems to be very vigilant compared with the Europeans,” he said.
Military strategist Dai Xu argued that, “Frequent accusations of spying and cyber attacking are means for the US to defame China.”
China arrested iron-ore giant Rio Tinto’s Shanghai office manager Stern Hu on charges of stealing state secrets last year.
