A Chinese engineer was sentenced on Wednesday to eight years in a US prison for providing Beijing with information about American experts in order to recruit them.
He was arrested in September 2018 for providing information on eight naturalized Chinese or Taiwanese Americans, some of whom were collaborators with the US defense sector.
In September, he was convicted of unlawful acts as an agent of a foreign government and making misleading statements at the conclusion of a two-week trial in Chicago.
According to the US Department of Justice, Ji Chaoqun was acting under the direction of Xu Banggong, a Chinese intelligence agent who was sentenced to 20 years in a US prison for attempting to steal technology from American and French airlines.
This client was convicted in November 2021 for seeking information for China from 2013 on several airlines, including US General Electric Aviation, the world’s leading aircraft engine manufacturer, and France’s Safran, which partnered with the first to developed the engine.
