China sentenced a home-grown science researcher with the death penalty after he was found guilty of selling state secrets to foreign agencies.
According to the South China Morning Post, 41-year-old Huang Yu was given the life sentence after authorities found out that he sold over 150,000 confidential documents to foreign spy agencies that have not been identified.
Citing the China Central Television, the SCMP revealed that the documents Huang leaked included 292 "confidential," 90 "top confidential," and 1,674 "secret" files, some of which are cipher codes for government, Communist Party, military, and financial communications.
Huang Yu and China's State Secrets
According to China.org, Huang Yu is a researcher who worked for a Chengdu-based encryption research institute between 1997 and 2004 but was dismissed for poor work performance in 2002.
At the time, Huang allegedly contacted a spy agency overseas to sell confidential information to them, most of which he was able to acquire from his work.
In June, he met with a representative of that foreign agency in a hotel located in an unidentified Southeast Asian country.
According to the outlet, he was paid $10,000 for three electronic documents that contained state military secrets and was promised a monthly payment of $50,000 by the foreign spy if he delivered more documents to them.
Prior to his arrest in 2011, Huang earned a total of $700,000 for leaking over 150,000 classified materials.
Aside from Huang, a Chinese court also sentenced his wife, Tang, to spend five years in prison, while her brother, identified only as Tan, was given three years imprisonment for "negligent disclosure of state secrets."
China's Efforts Against Espionage
Deemed as one of the most powerful nations in the East, China is a country that does not tolerate espionage when it's on the receiving end of the crime and Huang's death sentence is the latest proof of this fact.
In 2012, Chinese authorities sentenced a man identified as Tang with 15 years behind bars after he was found guilty of earning over 200,000 yuan ($30,880) for leaking military secrets to foreign organizations.
Three years after, four employees of one of Sichuan Province's top defense industry companies were sentenced for allegedly selling classified information about China's state-of-art weapons to foreign intelligence agencies, China Daily reported.
According to the outlet, one of the suspects known as Wen was approached online by an alias "H" and was offered a part-time job.
At the time, "H" told Wen that he was a journalist from a foreign media outlet and proposed to pay him a salary of 3,200 yuan ($534) per month if Wen allowed him access to restricted data.