BEIJING — An American geologist for a Douglas County- based company was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on China’s oil industry — data that experts say is commonly available.
In pronouncing Xue Feng guilty of spying and collecting state secrets, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court said his actions “endangered our country’s national security.”
Its verdict said Xue received documents on geological conditions of onshore oil wells and a database that gave the coordinates of more than 30,000 oil and gas wells belonging to China National Petroleum Corp. and listed subsidiary PetroChina Ltd. That information, it said, was sold to IHS Energy, the Colorado consultancy Xue worked for, now IHS Inc.
The verdict stunned the family of Xue, 45.
“I can’t describe how I feel. It’s definitely unacceptable,” Xue’s wife, Nan Kang, said by telephone, sobbing, from their home in a Houston suburb where she lives with their two children.
U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman attended the hearing to display Washington’s interest in the case. He left without commenting, and the U.S. Embassy issued a statement calling for Xue’s immediate release and deportation to the United States.
Xue’s sentence punctuates a case that has dragged on for more than 2 1/2 years and is likely to alarm foreign businesses unsure when normal business activities elsewhere might conflict with China’s vague state security laws.
Agents from China’s internal security agency detained Xue in November 2007. During the early days of his detention, they stubbed lit cigarettes into his arms and hit him on the head with an ashtray. His case became public when The Associated Press reported on it in November.
A spokesman for IHS said the company is disappointed by the news yet declined to comment on China’s broad interpretation of state secrets. In the past, the spokesman, Ed Mattix, has said that Chinese authorities never notified IHS that it was involved in any wrongdoing.
During Xue’s closed-door trial, which ran over three dates in July and in December, the court document said he defended himself, arguing that the information he gathered “is data that the oil sector in countries around the world make public.”
