A US district court in Albany, New York, has sentenced a former General Electric engineer to prison for conspiring to steal information about the company’s turbine technology for Chinese state entities.
The US District Court for the Northern District of New York ordered turbine specialist Xiaoqing Zheng at a sentencing hearing on 3 January to serve two years in prison and pay a $7,500 fine.
An Albany jury found Zheng guilty in March 2022 of one count of conspiring to commit economic espionage for plotting to steal technical data about GE turbines. Jurors acquitted the engineer of four related charges and were unable to reach a verdict on a further seven alleged offences including trade secret theft.
District Judge Mae D’Agostino said in a ruling filed shortly before the sentencing hearing that the evidence against Zheng at his trial was “unambiguous” in establishing that the engineer knew that the stolen information would benefit the Chinese government as well as “various foreign instrumentalities” by advancing their abilities to research, test and manufacture turbines.
Zheng’s sentence fell short of the nine-year prison stretch and the $500,000 fine that prosecutors had asked the court to hand down.
“This is a case of textbook economic espionage. Zheng exploited his position of trust, betrayed his employer and conspired with the government of China to steal innovative American technology,” said assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen, who heads the Justice Department’s national security division, in a statement on Tuesday.
Prosecutors accused Zheng – described by the judge as “one of the world’s leading experts” in his field – of conspiring with a Chinese businessman to steal GE’s turbine technology and pass it to Chinese state companies and universities. Zheng was allegedly part of the Chinese government’s “thousand talents” programme, which purportedly recruits overseas scientists to feed useful information and research back to the country.
“Xiaoqing Zheng was a Thousand Talents Program member and willingly stole proprietary technology and sent it back to the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” said Alan Kohler, an assistant director in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, in a statement.
Prosecutors first charged Zheng, a US citizen of Chinese descent, in 2018, the same year the Trump administration launched its China Initiative enforcement policy to target economic espionage and other national security threats from China. Olsen announced in 2022 that the department had ended the policy over concerns it could fuel a “narrative of intolerance and bias” against Chinese people.
Zheng was charged alongside Zhaoxi Zhang, a China-based businessman who allegedly tried to help the engineer secure Chinese state funding for business projects utilising GE’s stolen technology. Zhang remains at large and could not be reached for comment.
Zheng’s lawyer said in an emailed statement that his client intends to appeal against his sentence as well as the underlying conviction.
“The government charged 12 counts and obtained a conviction of one,” said Kevin Luibrand at Luidbrand in New York. “The judge also recognized on the record significant appeal issues that could undermine the entire government case and permitted Dr Zheng to remain free pending the conclusion of his appeal,” he added.
GE did not respond to a request for comment.
Counsel to Xiaoqing Zheng
Luibrand Law Firm
Partner Kevin Luibrand in New York
Akerman
Partners Bradley Henry and associate Kathleen Shannon in New York
Pryor Cashman
Associate Lazar William Sterling-Jackson in New York
For the DOJ
Assistant US attorney Rick Belliss and assistant US attorney Emily Powers in Albany, and trial attorney Matthew Chang of the National Security Division’s counterintelligence and export control section in Washington, DC
