WASHINGTON: A Chinese engineer was sentenced to eight years in a US prison on Wednesday for providing Beijing with information on possible recruitment targets.

Ji Chaoqun, who came to the US on a student visa in 2013 and later enlisted in the army reserves, was accused of identifying American scientists and engineers that could be recruited by the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security.

The body is a key Chinese intelligence unit involved in numerous schemes to illegally obtain US industrial and trade secrets.

Ji was arrested in September 2018 on charges that he had supplied Chinese intelligence with biographical information about eight people, all naturalised American citizens originally from China or Taiwan, and some of whom were US defence contractors.

Ji, about 31, was convicted in September of illegally acting as an agent of a foreign government and of making false statements after a two-week trial in Chicago. The charge is often used by US prosecutors in espionage-related cases where the accused is not clearly a foreign intelligence agent.

According to the Justice Department, Ji acted at the direction of Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director in the Jiangsu unit.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2023