Resumen de Geologist reflects on life behind bars in China
When Xue Feng landed his first job after academia as a petroleum consultant in 2000, he was delighted. His new employer, Denver-based IHS, had high ambitions for the young geologist: overhaul how the company—a corporate intelligence firm—gathered oil and gas data on China. By 2005, Feng had snared a rare, unclassified database of 30,000 oil wells in China from a private broker. Disaster struck on 20 November 2007. Feng was on a business trip in Beijing when he was abducted from his hotel room. Chinese security personnel charged the Chinese-born U.S. citizen with selling state secrets. His chief crime: arranging for IHS' purchase of the oil well database, which had been declared a state secret in 2007. In 2010, Feng was convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison, including the 3 years he had already spent in detention. He was finally released in April—10 months before his sentence was set to expire—and immediately deported to the United States, where he rejoined his wife and two children in Houston. Feng spoke with Science about his time in prison and what other researchers working abroad might glean from his experiences.
