Chinese Court Overturns U.S. Researcher’s Conviction

In a rare reversal, Beijing’s High Court has overturned the conviction of a Stanford University researcher sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for allegedly leaking Chinese state secrets, a human rights group reported Monday.

The announcement came as China is trying both to head off a U.S.-backed censure vote from the U.N. Human Rights Commission and to win permanent low-tariff access to U.S. markets.

In the past, Beijing has released political prisoners at sensitive times in an attempt to sway foreign opinion. Hua Di, 53, a former high-ranking member of China’s missile program, was charged with leaking unspecified state secrets.

He was a social science research associate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation when he was arrested two years ago while attending a family funeral.

The High Court found that the evidence against Hua was unclear and rejected his conviction, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China.

His case will be returned to the Beijing Intermediate Court for retrial, the Information Center said.

Chinese higher courts rarely overturn convictions involving political crimes and violations of the country’s vague State Secrets Law.

Court officials declined comment. U.S. Embassy spokesman Bill Palmer said embassy officials were inquiring about the report.

Hua fled to the United States in 1989 after criticizing the military assault on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

Born into an elite Communist family, he had studied rocket science in the Soviet Union and worked as a senior engineer for a defense technology commission.

At Stanford, he helped produce revealing works on China’s nuclear and other weapons programs. His research relied largely on already public documents, and university officials contend that Chinese military officials cooperated in his work.

Hua is one of several prominent Chinese scholars who have been imprisoned during visits to their homeland. Last year, Song Yongyi, a librarian and researcher at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, was imprisoned for six months on charges of stealing state secrets and then released.