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One of the few remaining industries China fails to dominate in the world, is chemicals. The chemical industry is central to the modern world economy, as it converts raw materials (oil, natural gas, air, water, metals, and minerals) into more than 70,000 different products. Chemicals have a nearly $3 trillion global market, and of the 20 biggest chemical corporations in the world, 18 of them are either Europeans, Americans or Japanese.

The United States is currently the world’s largest chemical producer, accounted for 19% of world’s production; this is followed by China’s 15%. The stats however, only take in consideration of individual nations, if we bring together the 27-member European Union (EU), their total production is 30%, while Japan stood at 7%.

China is upset by this, in most other industries, it has a comfortable lead against the U.S. and EU, but on chemicals, the two make up nearly half of the world’s production. Therefore, China begins to think of ways to cut further into the chemical market…

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U.S. authorities accused the Chinese government of directing a Malaysian-born U.S. businessperson to obtain valuable technology manufactured by chemical giant DuPont, and were seeking on Wednesday to keep him in jail ahead of his trial on charges relating to trade secret theft, prosecutors said in newly released court documents.

Walter Liew, a U.S. citizen, and his wife, Christina Liew, each were indicted by a Northern California grand jury on three counts, including witness tampering, making a false statement and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses and evidence, according to court documents. The trade secret theft charge is still on pending.

DuPont is the second largest chemical company in the US and sixth largest in the world. According to court documents, Walter Liew paid at least two former DuPont engineers for assistance in designing chloride-route titanium dioxide, also known as TiO2. DuPont is the world’s largest producer of titanium dioxide, a white pigment primarily used to make a range of white-tinted products, including paper, paint and plastics.

Both Liew, 54, and his wife have pleaded not guilty. Liew was held without bail, while his wife was released, court documents show. DuPont has also filed a separate civil lawsuit against Liew for misappropriating trade secrets. So far, Liew has denied obtaining or possessing “any confidential, proprietary trade secret materials” from DuPont regarding TiO2, according to court documents.

In the court filing on Tuesday, prosecutors argued that Liew has deep connections with Chinese officials. The paper mentioned that Liew was hosted at a banquet in 1991 by Luo Gan, who at the time was a high-ranking official of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, according to correspondence from Liew that U.S. federal officials say they seized from his safety deposit box. Luo Gan went on to become a member of the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo in China, prosecutors wrote in the filing.

“DuPont’s state-of-the-art technology is not available publicly and PRC (People’s Republic of China) companies have not been able to master it on their own,” prosecutors wrote. “Liew, however, obtained that technology from former DuPont employees and sold it to companies controlled by the PRC government.”

In his court filing seeking bail, Liew denied he was invited to a banquet with some Chinese officials, Liew’s attorneys’ note that he was born in Malaysia and has lived in the United States for 32 years, now a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment early on Wednesday.

The case was similar to the automotive/car industry few years back, where China trailed behind the West and Japan. In 2005-2006, employees from Ford & General Motors (GM) were found to transfer thousand pages of car tech secrets to Beijing. The tech secrets was distributed to the Chinese car industries, and China overtook Japan to become the world’s largest car manufacturer in 2009.

China is now the world’s second largest chemical manufacturer after the U.S., Tim Hanley, Global Chemical Sector Leader of Deloitte said last year in Beijing that the Asian giant is on its way to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest chemical producer very soon.

Hanley however, also noted that China’s chemical industry still has major challenges, such as low levels of industry concentration, limited capacity for innovation and energy inefficiency. The report stated that Chinese chemical companies should speed up industry restructuring and technical innovation to produce more advanced and high-value-added products, which may the fastest way it can overtake American chemical companies - zimbabwemetro