The first Chinese spy to be extradited to the US was sentenced to prison for attempting to steal trade secrets from Western aerospace companies, in a landmark case for American efforts to thwart Chinese industrial espionage.
Yanjun Xu, a deputy division director of China’s Ministry of State Security, was handed a 20-year jail sentence by a federal court in Cincinnati, the Department of Justice said in a release on Wednesday. The 42-year-old was said to have targeted employees at American aviation companies, including GE Aviation, and solicited proprietary information at the behest of the Chinese government, court documents showed.
