More like the authorities aren't being entirely forthcoming about what happened here. I'm willing to be this is entrapment and the "Chinese security official" is a US government agent.
Notice how despite his spying career only starting, he was already picked up? That's the giveaway. And they know so much about what he said to the "Chinese" official? Real people who were convicted for spying in the US went decades before they got caught - Ames, Pollard, etc. despite being very sloppy at times.
It reminds me of the '00 years during the WOT. Every month we'd hear about a terror cell being uncovered just before the plot was about to go down. Every detail was known about the plot including plans, who the terrorists spoke to and what they wanted to use. At the same time bombs were going off at train stations, airports, and festivals. How could police forces be so competent in some cases yet seemingly not know the first thing about the other ones?
Turns out the police forces were approaching young impressionable men in mosques, universities and on the internet (in some cases not even Muslim) and convincing them to become terrorists, radicalising them and giving them the means to carry out the attacks. In some cases they were honeypotted using an attractive girl.
I bet a similar thing is going on here. Entrapment cases are relatively easy to pull off, give the impression that government officials are hard at work and in this case generate politically useful headlines that the evil CCP is spying using disloyal Chinese-Americans. All the meanwhile the real spies are performing their job without hindrance because CI only get good at entrapment, and are probably not even Chinese).
I think we'll start to see more of these stories emerging as the America-China standoff continues, Chinese embassies in western countries need to start warning citizens that they may be approached by American authorities and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
