American geologist Xue Feng convicted of stealing secret information about China’s oil industry has received an eight year prison sentence under the country’s state secrets law, the Financial Times reported. According to US-based rights group The Dui Hua Foundation, the case against Xue came about from his attempt to purchase a database on China’s oil industry when working for IHS, an American energy consulting firm. "As I understand it, this database was not classified as a state secret until afterwards," said Dui Hua’s Joshua Rosenzweig. "Under Chinese state secrets laws, we have seen in the past that you can’t always go into a transaction knowing beforehand that what you are doing is wrong, because you can’t always know what is a state secret." Xue’s lawyer Tong Wei would not discuss the details of the database because it was a state secret.
Categories