Over two and a half weeks from late last October into November, federal prosecutors in a courtroom in Cincinnati drew on the wealth of digital material the 41-year-old Xu had stockpiled to lay out a portrait of him — his training, methods, and ambitions, his vices and private doubts and grievances. Translated from the original Mandarin, it's an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of how China's economic espionage machine works, and what life is like for its cogs.