Another China Industrial Espionage Case
Unlike the Xue Feng or Stern Hu cases, this one is in the U.S. and involves a Chinese chemical engineer who has been charged with passing on industrial secrets to the PRC. Classic Cold War-ish stuff, although this is slightly less fun since it involves information about insecticides developed by Dow Chemical {yawn}.
On the other hand, this is another instance of industrial policy in action, which is mildly interesting. It’s all fun and games until someone gets caught stealing secrets.
A 45-year-old Westborough man accused of illegally sending trade secrets to China may be granted bail.
Prosecutors said Monday in federal court in Worcester that Kexue Huang (coo-SHOO’ WHUNG) passed on insecticide information valued at more than $100 million to Hunan Normal University while he worked for Dow Chemical in Indiana from January 2003 to February 2008.
Huang faces a dozen counts of economic espionage to benefit a foreign government. His lawyer, James Duggan, said in court the allegations stem from an article Huang published in a Chinese academic journal.
Just as an aside, who writes those transliterations? That one above for “Kexue Huang” is absolutely horrid. The transliteration department would be putting their talents to much better use by explaining to their readers how best to pronounce “Worcester” in the local, unintelligible Western Mass dialect. (Answer: WHISS-ter.)
But back to the story of Mr. Huang. I don’t know what this guy actually did, although I doubt that a U.S. Attorney would get involved if he merely wrote a journal article. These U.S. Attorneys are busy folks that usually don’t screw around, unless they are explicitly told to do so by Karl Rove.
The problem with these cases (for China) is that the scope of “selling trade secrets to China” is extremely broad. In this instance, “China” was Hunan Normal University. It could just as easily been another university, a State-owned Enterprise, or a private company with “ties” to the Chinese government.
Huang might have been selling secrets to the government. Alternatively, he could have been dealing with someone with ties to Hunan Normal University who was trying to make a buck out of exploiting Dow Chemical technology. Who knows? Was it a government conspiracy or a more mundane case of theft?
The point is that this is one of the drawbacks of having a State-owned sector and an aggressive industrial policy. Anything happens and it’s laid on your doorstep, Beijing.
Innovation society, indeed.
What I wanted to know is how do you calculate “benefit of a foreign government”?
I don’t think that’s one of the elements of the crime. In general, though, the issue is whether the person was doing it for, or on behalf of, the foreign government.
I see, which mean it is going to be very difficult for anyone to find hard prove. But at the same time if the Dom’s lawyer don’t have those prove, why would they do this right?
Yeah, that’s right. In these cases, they are proving that the information was taken and shared/sold improperly. What the other government was going to do with those secrets is not relevant to the charges.
An Economic Espionage case because this guy decided to publish Dow’s ‘secrets’ in some academic journal? Boy, if I decide to quit my job and work for some Chinese Company, I wonder what are the chances that I will get charged for Economic Espionage because I happen to have extensive experience working on one system that this Chinese company desperately needs?
The whole journal article comment was made by his defense lawyer, so take that with a grain of salt. As I said, I doubt that the U.S. Attorney would go after this guy without a lot more evidence.