Late last month, Germany arrested four people on suspicion of spying for China. At the same time, two men were charged in the UK for similar offences. China has dismissed the spy claims, labelling them false and “malicious”.
According to China’s criminal law, whoever “steals, spies on, buys, or unlawfully supplies state secrets or intelligence for an overseas body, organisation or individual” can face life imprisonment.
State employees who “intentionally or negligently divulge state secrets” can be sentenced to up to seven years in prison, SCMP reported.
An Amnesty International report in 2021 claimed that “dozens of people” have been detained in China on charges related to state secrets since the law was introduced in 1988.
In 1993, Bai Weiji and Zhao Lei, a Chinese couple who formerly worked for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, were sentenced to 10 years and six years in prison respectively for “providing state secrets to a foreigner”.
Bai was accused of passing classified documents to the Washington Post’s Beijing correspondent while his wife was accused of translating some of the documents.
In 2006, Lu Jianhua, a Chinese sociologist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was sentenced behind closed doors to 20 years in jail for leaking state secrets.
His case was linked to that of Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong, who at that time was chief China correspondent for The Straits Times.
Lu was accused of writing articles for Ching containing “top state secrets”. Ching himself was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to five years’ jail for spying before his release in 2008.
Ching published a book in 2013 recounting his incarceration, titled My 1,000 Days Ordeal: A Patriot’s Torture.
According to an SCMP article, former Straits Times editor Leslie Fong, who was his immediate supervisor when he was arrested, said of the decision to publish the book: “Our stand on Ching Cheong is clear: we do not admit or accept the espionage charge levelled at him.”
Most recently, Chinese authorities claimed in January to have detained an individual alleged to be spying for Britain’s foreign intelligence service. Officials did not specify whether this is under the anti-espionage or state secrets law.
Last October, it arrested a Japanese businessman who had been detained earlier on suspicion of espionage. Since 2015, Beijing has detained 17 Japanese nationals on charges of espionage and offences relating to national security, according to an Asahi Shimbun report.
