Xue, a 45-year-old US citizen, who was born in northwestern China's Shaanxi Province, was sentenced July 5 to eight years in prison by the Beijing Intermediate Court, and fined 200,000 yuan.

By Guo Qiang

The appeal for US geologist, Xue Feng, who was convicted in July of collecting and selling Chinese State secrets, was held Tuesday at a Beijing appeals court amid renewed US pressure urging China to release him.

Xue, a 45-year-old US citizen, who was born in northwestern China's Shaanxi Province, was sentenced July 5 to eight years in prison by the Beijing Intermediate Court, and fined 200,000 yuan. He appealed against the verdict July 14.

The two-hour-plus hearing by Beijing's High People's Court ended with a judgment, and complaints were raised by the US embassy that officials were barred from the hearing.

Tong Wei, Xue's lawyer, told the Global Times Tuesday that "It is unclear when the judgment will be handed down. We have to wait before being informed by the court." The lawyer acknowledged that chances for the verdict to be overturned were slim.

Xue is now imprisoned in the detention center under China's National Security Bureau and is in good shape, according to Tong.

Xue was detained in November 2007 after gathering and selling an oil industry database to his former employer, Colorado-based consultancy IHS Energy, now known as IHS Inc.

Outside the courthouse, US embassy deputy chief of mission Robert Goldberg read a statement to reporters saying, "The US urges the High Court and the Chinese government to ensure fairness and transparency concerning Xue's appeal."

"We urged the Chinese to grant Xue a humanitarian release and immediately deport him so that he can return to the US and be reunited with his family," the statement read.

The US had filed a formal protest with the foreign ministry, according to the official.

No official response has been made by Chinese authorities so far and no questions pertaining to the case were raised at Tuesday's regular conference hosted by the foreign ministry. But after Xue was convicted in July, the ministry said "The case was strictly handled according to law. It is China's internal affair, and China's judicial sovereignty brooks no foreign interference."

Xue's case came just months after mining giant Rio Tinto's China-born Australian employee Stern Hu was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Stern was convicted on charges of taking bribes and stealing commercial secrets involving China's purchase of iron ore.

Mo Shaoping, a criminal defense lawyer and a professor at the Central University of Finance and Econom-ics, told the Global Times that "China has its own laws concerning national secrets. In China, such cases are not open to the public for security reasons."

He cautioned that China's definition about business secrets and state secrets appears to be blurry, which is likely to trigger more disputes and conflicts.

In Xue's case, the database contains geological information for more than 32,000 oil and gas wells belonging to two Chinese oil companies, that were classified by China as State secrets. But Xue and his lawyer argued that this information is commonly available from the Internet.

The case of Xue came amid a growing number of conflicts involving espionage charges between the US and China in recent years.

According to the Beijing Youth Daily in July, 16 years after the US passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1994, most charged suspects have been from the Chinese mainland.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's National Security Division, said that "in re-cent years, the Justice Department has handled an increasing number of prosecutions involving sensitive American weapons technology, trade secrets and other restricted information bound for China", the Washington Post reported this July.

A compendium of successful federal prosecutions involving espionage and related charges against Chinese agents, provided by Boyd, showed that the Justice Department had convicted 44 individuals in 26 cases since March 2008, almost all of whom are now serving time in federal prisons.

With cooperation and competition growing between China and the US, it is to be expected that more cases involving the theft of business or national secrets will come to light, according to Jiang Yong, director of the Center for Economic Security Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"Petroleum is a strategic reserveand, therefore, stealing business secrets in this field is to steal China's national secrets, as it concerns the country's energy security," Jiang told the Global Times, suggesting that Chinese enterprises should realize the cruelty of international competition and strengthen the way they keep secrets.

Chen Rui contributed to this story