The US ambassador to Beijing, who is sizing up a run for the White House, decried on Friday a Chinese court for rejecting the appeal of an American jailed on industrial spying charges.
The US ambassador to Beijing, who is sizing up a run for the White House, decried on Friday a Chinese court for rejecting the appeal of an American jailed on industrial spying charges.
It was the second time in recent days that Jon Huntsman, a former Republican governor of Utah who will soon leave his job in Beijing, has sparred with China over rights.
"I'm extremely disappointed in the outcome, although it wasn't completely unexpected," Huntsman said after the court upheld an 8-year jail sentence US citizen Xue Feng received last year for arranging the sale of a Chinese oil database.
"We ask the Chinese government to consider an immediate humanitarian release of Xue Feng, thereby allowing him to get back to his family and to his way of life," Huntsman told reporters outside the court.
Critics say Xue's conviction was unwarranted under China's vague state secrets laws, and Huntsman and the Obama administration have repeatedly pressed for his release.
"This case has been brought up in every single meeting that I've been involved with for almost two years," Huntsman said, referring to dealings between Beijing and Washington. "We'll not let this one go."
China maintains the court ruling was properly handed down, but critics say China's prosecutors and courts often do the bidding of party officials.
Earlier in the week, Huntsman clashed with China over online censorship. He posted messages on a Twitter-like Chinese microblog service, asking readers their opinions on a speech by secretary of state Hillary Clinton about Internet freedom, the Wall Street Journal reported.
His messages were deleted by censors, who often remove text that questions the wide controls on speech imposed by China's ruling Communist Party.
Huntsman's brother said the ambassador, a fluent Mandarin speaker who was given his post by President Obama, will decide within a couple of weeks whether to bid for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race.
Were he to, his positions on China as Obama's envoy are likely to come under intense scrutiny.
Huntsman was involved in the Obama administration's efforts to steady relations with Beijing after tensions in 2010, when the two powers argued over Chinese Internet censorship, Tibet, US arms sales to Taiwan, disputed Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea and unease over North Korea.
In January, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a state visit to the White House, a summit that both sides said helped to improve ties, although there were no major policy breakthroughs.
Xue, a Chinese-born geologist, was detained late in 2007 after negotiating the sale of an oil industry database to his employer at the time, Colorado-based consultancy IHS Energy, now known as IHS Inc.
The database was classified as a state secret only after Xue helped sell it, according to the Duihua Foundation, a US-based group that promotes prisoners' rights in China.
After Xue's conviction last year on charges of attempting to obtain and traffic in state secrets, the US state department said it was extremely concerned about his rights to proper legal process, and called on Beijing to free him.
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