China Ignores Appeal From Obama, Jails US Geologist

(July 5) -- China today ignored a personal appeal from President Barack Obama and sentenced a U.S. geologist to eight years in prison for buying confidential information about China's oil industry. The court in Beijing also fined Xue Feng $30,000 for attempting to obtain and traffic state secrets.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said in a statement that it was dismayed by the punishment, according to The Associated Press, and called for Xue's immediate "humanitarian release" and deportation. Many experts see the sentence as a rebuke for Washington, which has taken a strong interest in the case. President Obama raised Xue's release in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao last November, and Huntsman and other diplomats have visited the geologist some 30 times since he was detained in 2007.

The case has exposed the stark problems facing foreign multinationals that attempt to carry out basic research and analysis in China. State security agents seized the geologist, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China whose family lives in Texas, in Nov. 2007 after he purchased a detailed commercial database on China's oil industry for his American employer, the Colorado-based engineering consultancy IHS.

Both Xue, 45, and IHS have said that at the time of the sale, the database was in the public domain. According to the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco- based nonprofit that campaigns for human rights in China, it was only after the geologist had purchased the information that the government ruled the data was a state secret.

Joshua Rosenzweig of Dui Hua told Agence France-Presse that he suspected "some of Xue Feng's statements to the police might have been obtained under coercion including torture." During meetings with consular officials, Xue showed them scars on his arms that he said were caused by interrogators stubbing out cigarettes on his skin.

Today's sentence "sends a very bad signal to the foreign business community if they care to examine what happened," John Kamm, Dui Hua's executive director told the Wall Street Journal. "This guy was doing his job. Where's the damage to justify this? This is an outrageous decision."

Xue, who graduated from the University of Chicago, is the latest in a succession of foreign nationals to be handed a harsh penalty, a trend some observers say reflects the Chinese government's increasingly confident and confrontational international posture. In March, Australian Stern Hu, an executive with mining giant Rio Tinto, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accepting bribes and trading commercial secrets. The following month, China executed four alleged Japanese drug smugglers, the first executions of Japanese nationals carried out since the two countries normalized relations in 1972.

And late last year, British national Akmal Shaikh was executed for smuggling heroin despite pleas for mercy from the British government, which presented strong evidence that the Shaikh was mentally ill and his case had been mishandled by Chinese courts.