A CHINESE-born engineer has been found guilty of conspiring to export American defence technology to China, including data on a system that could make submarines virtually undetectable.

Chi Mak also was found guilty in California of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, attempting to violate export control laws and making false statements to the FBI.

Mak faces up to 45 years in prison when he is sentenced on 10 September .

The government accused Mak, a naturalised United States citizen, of taking thousands of pages of documents from his defence contractor employer, Power Paragon, and giving them to his brother, who passed them along to Chinese authorities over a number of years.

Mak, 66, was arrested in 2005 in Los Angeles after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law as they boarded a flight to Hong Kong. Investigators said they found three encrypted CDs in their luggage that contained documents on a submarine propulsion system, a solid-state power switch for ships and a presentation on the future of power electronics.

Mak’s wife, brother and other relatives also have been indicted and are to go on trial together on 5 June.

Mak acknowledged during the trial that he copied classified documents from his employer and kept copies in his office. He said he did not realise that making the copies was illegal. The trial featured testimony from a parade of FBI agents, US navy officials and encryption and espionage experts.

(MarketWatch)The hype is everywhere: Eat organic food for a healthier body. The problem: That good body comes with a heftier price tag. Just visit your local supermarket and compare the price of “regular” tomatoes with organic ones chances are, you’ll pay at least 20% more.

But if you’re determined to buy organic foods for your family, there are ways to find lower prices. Here are a few:

Shop around:
In your community, there are probably a number of markets and grocery stores that sell organic goods but all prices are not created equal. Do your homework by getting to know your options. Keep track of how much each place charges for different items you’ll start noticing some patterns.

Visit farmer’s markets:
You’ll find lots of great local produce, and there is much more flexibility when it comes to buying. If you go later in the day, you’ll probably get better deals because vendors will want to sell off unsold goods at lower prices rather than take them back home. You can also negotiate or ask for a lower rate if you’re buying in bulk. Some farmer’s markets also offer produce that is slightly misshapen but still good at a lower price. Just ask.

Join a food co-op:
Such organizations offer groceries and other goods to members at discounted prices. You’ll probably have to pay some dues each year, but the savings will make up for the difference if you buy a lot of organic products. Visit to find one in your area.

Look for coupons:
You probably won’t find them in your Sunday paper, but coupons for organic products do exist. When you buy an organic product, there may be a coupon on the packaging. You should also visit Web sites of companies that sell organic goods they may have special offers. And if you really love a product or company, write to them and tell them so. They’ll probably send you a coupon as a “thank you.”

As the National People’s Congress prepares to meet in early March for its annual policy-setting meeting, economic and social issues are looming large in China, and one overshadows the rest: the mainland’s widening income gap. In both the state press and the independent blogosphere, the media are abuzz with reports on just how serious the problem has become.

Several recent reports add fuel to the fire. At the end of December a survey came out showing that 90% of Chinese believe the gap between rich and poor is “serious,” while 80% agree that the government must take action to redress the inequity.

The survey hardly focused on the disadvantaged—one would presume they are more sensitive to the issue. The Beijing-based China Youth Daily and Internet portal Sina.com questioned 10,250 people, ages 20 to 30, all of them with a college education and a job.

And on Jan. 31, China’s National Development & Reform Commission showed the concern is justified. Urban incomes now are 3.2 times those of rural residents (who only earned $413 per year in 2005, the last year data were available), up from 2.5 in 1978, when China started to reform its economy and open it to the world. Making Opinions Known

The inequality problem is only getting worse. The top 10% of urban Chinese earn 9.2 times as much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous year. In rural China, the multiple was 7.3, compared with 6.9 one year before. China is facing an “alarming” situation, said Labor & Social Security Ministry official Su Hainan, according to a Feb. 2 report by official news agency Xinhua.

In response, policy makers and citizens are debating a host of new laws intended to strengthen the rights of workers, including regulations on social security and labor disputes, and an employment promotion law. All of these will be discussed at the Congress that starts on Mar. 5, and then will likely be enacted throughout the rest of this year. A key employment-contract law likely to pass in May elicited more than 190,000 comments from individuals, institutes, and companies, including foreign employers eager to influence its final form.

Meanwhile, China is continuing its drive to unionize foreign and private employers across the mainland. Chinese unions have traditionally focused on minimizing labor disputes in order to support the Communist Party but are increasingly active supporting workers’ rights. That push was behind Wal-Mart (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) allowing the official All China Federation of Trade Unions to open branches in its mainland stores in August of last year. Hurts Social Stability

Why does Beijing care about inequity? One obvious reason is that it is sparking social unrest. Protests by workers angry about unpaid wages and farmers concerned over land seizures by local governments have helped fuel the estimated 87,000 major protest incidents that occurred in 2005, up from only 11,000 a decade before, according to China’s Public Security Ministry.

“When a country has such high disparity it cannot sustain social stability,” says Li Ping, chief representative of the Beijing office of the Rural Development Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that focuses on rural land issues.

To show Beijing’s concern about widening social inequity, Premier Wen Jiabao on Feb. 6 met with a group of farmers, construction workers, and unemployed laborers. The purpose: to get their input before he presents the government’s annual work report at the upcoming March Congress.

“It is [a government] of the people, for the people, and by the people. This is our objective,” said Wen according to official news agency Xinhua following the meeting. Little Enforcement

It’s noble goal in principle, but all too often pretty words like Wen’s don’t translate into any real policy change. Meanwhile, new regulations often don’t get implemented fully in the far reaches of China.

“Even when China has very good laws, implementation lags far behind,” says RDI’s Li Ping. Adds Kent D. Kedl, executive director of Shanghai-based business consultancy Technomic Asia: “They talk about the law, then they issue the law. Then it is another two or three years before it is finally enforced, and then only selectively.”

The problem is, Beijing may not have that time to spare. Already China’s richest 10% of the population owns 40% of all private assets, while 2% of total wealth goes to the bottom tenth, according to a survey released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in January. With stark differences like that, it’s no wonder income disparity increasingly is seen as the most pressing issue for the mainland.