TIMELINE - Ethnic Chinese nabbed for stealing secrets, espionage

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States is seeking the release of Chinese-born, American geologist Xue Feng, who was detained two years ago on state secrets charges after negotiating the purchase of an oil industry database.

The following is a chronology of cases involving ethnic Chinese executives of foreign companies and Chinese-born, overseas-based academics, reporters and dissidents charged with stealing state secrets, espionage or other crimes.

March 1996 - An official of the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp was detained for leaking state secrets to a Chinese employee of Royal Dutch Shell who was released after spending a year largely incommunicado. Shell was in talks with CNOOC then to build an oil refinery.

October 1996 - China freed a Chinese employee of Swiss-owned

SBC Warburg, detained for one month on suspicion of leaking state

secrets, apparently for having helped prepare materials for company clients on the trend of China's currency, the yuan.

November 1999 - Australian businessman James Peng, held in a Chinese prison for six years, was released on parole and deported. He had been abducted from a hotel in Macau in October 1993, spirited across the border to China and sentenced in 1996 to 18 years in jail on bribery charges.

January 2000 - Song Yongyi, a Pennsylvania-based scholar and expert on China's chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, was released after five months in a Chinese prison on charges of gathering state secrets. He has since become a U.S. citizen.

July 2001 - Li Shaomin, a Hong Kong-based U.S. professor, was convicted of spying for Taiwan, but spared a sentence and released after spending five months in custody. The conviction came one day after Beijing won its bid to host the 2008 Olympics.