After being convicted last January, a Chinese spy who was granted an F-1 student visa to spy for the United States Army has been sentenced by a federal court.
Ji Chaoqun (31-year-old Chinese national) was sentenced this week to eight years in federal jail for spying on China.
According to Breitbart News, Chaoqun was convicted in 2013 on one count of conspiracy, one count of acting an agent of a foreign country, one count of acting an agent of People’s Republic of China and one count of lying to the U.S. Army.
Chaoqun was charged and arrested in 2018. He had arrived in America on an F-1 student visa in order to study electrical engineering at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology.
The evidence at trial revealed that Chaoqun was in the U.S. working under the direction of high-ranking intelligence officials at the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security, (JSSD), a regional division of the Chinese Communist Party Ministry of State Security.
Xu Yanjun, a Minister of State Security executive, ordered Chaoqun to provide background information to intelligence officers on U.S. citizens who might be recruited to the JSSD as they worked for U.S. defence contractors.
The espionage operation had the goal of providing high-ranking Chinese officials access to critical U.S. satellite and aerospace technologies.
Chaoqun, who was working secretly for the Chinese government in 2016, enlisted as an E4 specialist under the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program (MAVNI).
Chaoqun, despite his work in China, denied that he had worked for any foreign government over the past seven years. He also failed to disclose any relationship with Chinese intelligence officers of high rank.
This case is not the first to highlight the government’s failures to import hundreds of thousands of Chinese students every year.
For example, in Fiscal Year 2021, almost 350,000 Chinese citizens were granted student visas. China sends more nationals annually to the United States than any other country to fill limited places at American colleges and universities. In other words, the U.S. has more than three-in-10 foreign students who arrived from China.
