Leaking Chinese Secrets Now Deadly

China's highest court has given explicit approval for judges to sentence to death people convicted of passing state secrets and sensitive intelligence abroad, state media reported Monday.

Sentencing guidelines issued by the State Supreme People's Court on Sunday partially clarify the murky standards for meting out lengthy prison terms or executions under a vague criminal statute.

The instructions come two weeks after the publication overseas of purportedly secret Communist Party documents on crushing the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. The papers, if genuine, describe in detail a split among Chinese leaders over the crackdown, still politically sensitive 12 years later.

Although The Tiananmen Papers have not been published in China or in Chinese, Internet accounts have created a stir among lower-level party members in Beijing and drawn accusations of fraud from the government.

A spokesman for China's high court denied that the new guidelines were prompted by The Tiananmen Papers.

"There's no special purpose for us to issue this interpretation at this time. It's just a normal interpretation about legal matters," said a spokesman who gave his name as Mr. Gong.

The guidelines say courts may order execution for stealing, gathering, selling or otherwise illegally providing state secrets and intelligence that "gravely harms the country or people, or has particularly odious circumstances," according to reports in the People's Daily and other newspapers.

Prison terms of 10 years or more and confiscation of property are called for if offenders transfer top-secret information, more than three items of classified information or if the intelligence "causes extremely grave harm to national security or interests," the reports said.

Lesser sentences are warranted for less sensitive materials, the reports said.

The instructions flesh out statutes in China's criminal code, revised 3 1/2 years ago. Only one clause explicitly deals with state secrets and does not mention the death penalty, although a separate catchall clause allows for executions in matters that severely harm national security.

China has in recent years tried to tighten its hold on what it considers state secrets, especially given the challenge of the Internet. In its guidelines, the high court said disseminating of state secrets on the Internet would also be dealt with according to the harm it causes the country, the reports said.

Still left murky in the guidelines are definitions of state secrets and intelligence. Information publicly circulated in other countries is routinely considered secret by China.