A USA embassy spokeswoman said today her trial was closed to the public and a request to have a consular officer attend had been refused.
She was accused of espionage and stealing state secrets for allegedly passing intelligence to a third party, according to previous reports from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) that cited unnamed government sources.
Phan Phan-Gillis, a naturalized USA citizens and Texas resident who goes by the name Sandy, was detained two years ago for crimes that allegedly took place over two decades ago. A United Nations panel has said her detention violated worldwide norms, and the US has long pressed China to resolve the case fairly.
The U.S. State Department has repeatedly raised Phan-Gillis' case with the Chinese government.
She worked as a consultant for Houston businesses interested in Chinese customers and investment, as well as for Chinese businesses interested in Texas.
The US government is in contact with the Chinese government at the "highest levels" about the case, a spokeswoman at the US embassy said.
Phan-Gillis was now being held in a detention centre and not a prison and did not plan to appeal, he said.
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She was detained during a 2015 business trip. Her husband, Jeff Gillis, declined to comment other than to say: "I will just be happy if we can bring Sandy home".
China's opaque legal system often provides little or no explanation for why someone is detained or punished.
"She's supposed to serve the sentence in China", her lawyer Shang said. The husband of USA citizen Phan "Sandy" Phan-Gillis, who has been charged in China with spying, has spent months trying to prove his wife's innocence with the little information he had.
"I have the passport that shows that she didn't even have a visa in '96, no entries or exits", he said.
Nanning Intermediate People's Court in the southern province of Guangxi issued the sentence Tuesday, but the American's next steps will not become clear until a written judgement is released at an unknown future date, Dui Hua Foundation director John Kamm told AFP.
A Houston woman who has been held in China for years, accused of spying, has now been sentenced. Kamm said he was told by "people who were in the room" that Tillerson pressed Phan-Gillis' case in private meetings.
Despite criticising China on the campaign trail, US President Donald Trump has recently warmed to it after a summit with President Xi Jinping in Florida in early April when Trump said they had developed an "outstanding" relationship.
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