Catherine Matacic reports that when Xue Feng landed his first job after academia in 2000, he was delighted. His new employer, Englewood, Colorado based IHS, had high ambitions for the young geologist. His assignment was to overhaul how the company gathers corporate intelligence on oil and gas data in China. Feng embarked on his assignment with gusto, so much so that in 2005, when he was 40 years old, he suffered a mild heart attack. By 2005, he had obtained a rare, unclassified database of 30,000 oil wells in China from a private broker. The database promised substantial profits for IHS and, in a country that tightly guards such data on national security grounds, also involves substantial risks.
Real trouble began on 20 November 2007. Feng, who had just left IHS for Houston-based C&C Reservoirs, was on a business trip to Beijing when he was abducted from his hotel room. Chinese security personnel interrogated him and charged Feng, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen, with selling state secrets. His chief crime was of arranging for IHS to purchase the oil well database, which the Chinese government declared a state secret in 2007. In 2010, Feng was convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison, including the nearly 3 years he had already spent in detention.
Beware of the potential problems when traveling overseas...
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