China has sentenced a 78-year-old US citizen to life in prison on spying charges.
Authorities in the country detained John Shing-Wan Lueng, who holds a permanent residency in Hong Kong, in April 2021.
Mr Lueng was targeted by the counterintelligence agency in the southeastern city of Suzhou.
Now, the city’s court has announced that he will serve a life sentence in prison giving no further details of the charges.
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The court in Suzhou did not indicate that Mr Lueng’s crimes were related to overall China-US relations, but spying charges in the country can be selective with little evidence backing them up.
The Chinese judicial system is completely controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
US and Chinese relations also suffered earlier this year when a Chinese court upheld its death sentence of a US citizen.
American citizen Mark Swidan, a businessman from Texas, had been in prison for more than a decade since he was arrested in 2012 on drug-related charges.
He was convicted of manufacturing and trafficking drugs in 2019 by the Jiangmen Intermediate People’s Court in southern Guangdong province.
This resulted in a death sentence with a two-year reprieve. The US State Department said it was “disappointed” when the sentence was upheld.
State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said: “Today the People’s Republic of China’s Jiangmen Intermediate Court denied wrongfully detained US national Mark Swidan’s appeal, and upheld his death penalty with a two-year suspended death sentence.
“We are disappointed by this decision and will continue to press for his immediate release and return to the United States.”
Mr Swidan’s mother, Katherine Swidan, told CNN earlier this year that her son had been detained in what she described as a “holding tank.”
She added: “He’s been in there for 10 years, where they never turn the lights off, so as a result, he’s going blind. He’s got fractures in his leg.”
She also told reporters that guards at the facility “broke his hands five to seven times.”
Ms Swidan continued: “He’s suffering and he’s got an infection. He has severe periodontal disease. He has holes in his mouth that bleed constantly. He’s lost 130 pounds.”
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