A Chinese man received a death sentence for  giving away more than 150,000 documents containing classified information to an unknown foreign agency.

Huang Yu, 48, reportedly sold the classified papers to foreign intelligence agencies between 2002 and 2011, reports the China Central Television. He was able to earn a total of $700,000 for all the transactions that transpired within the period.

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Huang was a technician for a research institute in Sichuan province in southwest China. The Institute helped develop a cipher system used by both the Chinese government and the military.

However, after he was sacked in 2004 due to his bad performance, Huang contacted a foreign spy agency and offered to sell classified documents of secret cipher codes from the Communist Party.

He met with the foreign spy agency in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong for a total of 21 meetings. He was initially given $10,000 for cooperating with the agency and received a subsequent monthly salary of $5,000, in addition to receiving training in espionage-related activities.

When Huang realized that he was running out of ‘stocks’ to give to his client, he then turned to his wife and brother-in-law, both of whom worked in government offices that handled state secrets. All in all, he was able to release 90 ‘top confidential,’ 292 ‘confidential,’ and 1,674 ‘secret’ files to his client.

Huang was arrested in 2011 and was convicted for espionage. He was given the death sentence, although it remains unclear when he will be executed or if he had been executed already. His wife and brother-in-law were also arrested and convicted for ‘negligence’ that led to spilling state secrets. Huang’s wife was sentenced for five years in prison,while his brother-in-law was sentenced for three.

China’s Serious Stance against Espionage

China recently celebrated National Security Education Day on Friday. To properly educate rank-and-file employees of the possible attempts at stealing state secrets, the government has released a comic-book poster that warns young female government workers to take extra caution in dating good-looking foreigners who could be spies-in-disguise.

The posters feature a female civil servant named Xiao Li, who happened to meet a foreign man named David. While their friendship quickly developed (thanks to David’s outpouring of compliments and romantic actions towards Xiao Li), the ending revealed that the foreigner was indeed a spy who built the relationship with the civil servant to steal information.

TagsHuang Yu, espionage, spying