China on Thursday called U.S. allegations of Chinese spying «groundless» and urged the U.S. to stop its «Cold War thinking.» According to AP,The reaction from a Foreign Ministry spokesman came after a U.S. Defense Department analyst and a former engineer for Boeing Co. were charged in separate espionage cases with handing over military secrets to the Chinese government. «The so-called accusation against China is totally groundless. We urge the U.S. to stop its Cold War thinking and stop groundless accusations, and do more to contribute to our mutual trust and friendship between our two peoples,» Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regular news conference. Liu said that such cases brought by the U.S. did not help relations between the countries. The U.S. Justice Department said the spying attempts were the latest efforts by China to gain top secret information about U.S. military systems and sales that threatens the country's national security and economic standing. In the first case, prosecutors said weapons systems policy analyst Gregg W. Bergersen, 51, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia, sold classified defense information to a New Orleans furniture salesman. In return, the salesman, a Taiwan native identified as Tai Kuo, a 58-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, forwarded the information to the Chinese government. The data outlined every planned U.S. sale of weapons or other military technology to Taiwan for the next five years, U.S. prosecutors said. In the second, unrelated case, former Boeing engineer Dongfan «Greg» Chung, a 72-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested on charges of working as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government who stole trade secrets from the defense contractor. The stolen data largely focused on aerospace programs, including the Space Shuttle, U.S. prosecutors said.
