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China Dismisses US Spying Allegations

BEIJING (AP) ? China on Thursday called U.S. allegations of Chinese spying "groundless" and urged the U.S. to stop its "Cold War thinking." The reaction from a Foreign Ministry spokesman came after a U.S. Defense Department analyst and a former engineer for Boeing Co. were charged in separate espionage cases with handing over military secrets to the Chinese government. "The so-called accusation against China is totally groundless. We urge the U.S. to stop its Cold War thinking and stop groundless accusations, and do more to contribute to our mutual trust and friendship between our two peoples," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regular news conference. Liu said such cases brought by the U.S. did not help relations between the countries. The U.S. Justice Department said the alleged spying attempts were the latest efforts by China to gain top-secret information about U.S. military systems and sales. In the first case, prosecutors said weapons systems policy analyst Gregg W. Bergersen, 51, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia, sold classified defense information to a New Orleans furniture salesman. They said the salesman, a Taiwanese native identified as Tai Kuo, a naturalized U.S. citizen, forwarded the information to the Chinese government. The data outlined every planned U.S. sale of weapons or other military technology to Taiwan for the next five years, the prosecutors said. In the second, unrelated case, former Boeing engineer Dongfan "Greg" Chung, a 72-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested on charges of working as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government who allegedly stole trade secrets from the defense contractor. The stolen data largely focused on aerospace programs, including the Space Shuttle, U.S. prosecutors said.

Full post as published by The Trade Secrets Vault on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).