A Chinese court has sentenced an engineer to death for espionage and selling state secrets to foreign intelligence services, the Ministry of State Security said.
The former assistant engineer at a research institute, identified only by his surname Liu, was held guilty of leaking sensitive information, a crime that the ministry said had severely endangered national security.
Liu copied classified papers before leaving his post, driven by resentment over stalled career progress and perceived unfair treatment. He attempted to sell the material after taking financial losses from failed investments, the ministry said.
He meticulously planned his espionage activities, using multiple aliases, anonymous communication channels and encoded messages to avoid detection, the Global Times reported.
Liu established contact with a foreign intelligence agency, offering to sell classified documents.
The agency took the material at a low cost and severed ties with him.
Undeterred, Liu continued seeking buyers and travelled to multiple countries over six months, further compromising national security, the ministry said.
The security services tracked Liu’s activities and arrested him after gathering substantial evidence. The ministry did not disclose the timeline of the case, including when the verdict was delivered but confirmed that he had been sentenced to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights.
The case highlights China’s increasing focus on national security and espionage threats. In recent years, authorities have intensified warnings about foreign intelligence agencies targeting Chinese citizens, particularly those working in sensitive industries.
The Ministry of State Security, which launched an official WeChat account in 2023, has used social media to caution citizens against espionage risks and foreign recruitment tactics.
China remains secretive about its use of the death penalty, with execution statistics classified as state secrets.
Last year, the ministry announced that a former employee at one of China’s state agencies had been given a rare death sentence for leaking “state secrets” after he was accused of handing over his USB drive to foreign spy agencies.
The man surnamed Zhang provided a “large number of top-secret and confidential state secrets to foreign spy intelligence agencies, seriously endangering China’s national security”, the ministry posted on WeChat on 6 November 2024.
While it did not reveal his full name or his previous job, the ministry said Zhang was once “a core confidential personnel of a state agency” and was exposed to a large number of state secrets at work.
After leaving his job, Zhang became an “important target for foreign spy intelligence agencies to win over and subvert”.
Chinese lawmakers passed a wide-ranging update to Beijing’s anti-espionage legislation in April, banning the transfer of any information related to national security and broadening the definition of spying.
In a separate case earlier last year, a Beijing court handed Australian writer Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence on espionage charges in February, a decision the Australian government described as “harrowing”.
A suspended death sentence in China gives the accused a two-year reprieve from being executed, after which it is automatically converted to life imprisonment, or, more rarely, fixed-term imprisonment. The individual remains in prison throughout.
