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Ex-General Electric employee sentenced to 2 years for conspiring to steal trade secrets for China
- New York-based engineer who specialised in turbine sealing technology worked at company for 10 years
- Sentencing follows conviction alongside Chinese businessman over plan to take proprietary knowledge
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Robert Delaneyin Washington
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.
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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.
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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.
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