US company’s China employee allegedly stole code to help local government

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.

The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.

Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.

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