How I (nearly) became a Chinese intelligence asset

Falling in with the Beijing spy machine is easier than you might think, writes Jonathan Margolis, especially if you've made 27 trips there as a small-fry business consultant ...

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How easy would it be to find yourself accused of being a Chinese intelligence asset? Pretty difficult, you might think - until you enter the slightly grey zone of travelling to China repeatedly for work - 27 times in 10 years in my case.

Like the former parliamentary researchers Christopher Cash and the academic Christopher Berry, who were accused of being spies, I regarded my activities in China as "consultancy"; a side-hustle to my day job in London and New York as a journalist. I was going to try to make money, but I had also long been fascinated by China and developed a deep love of the country, even considering studying Chinese at university.

My work in China, with a British friend who worked in PR, was small fry. My friend and I were advising Chinese businesses, mostly in technology, on how to handle the Western media. We gave lectures at elite universities and business schools, too. But it might have escalated to the point where MI6 took an interest. If someone had wanted to be awkward, what I was doing could easily have been interpreted as aiding and abetting an enemy state. Or perhaps just helping a "competitor", as successive British governments prefer to regard China.

The way Chinese companies dealt with Chinese journalists was the time-honoured "red envelope" method. When you wanted to publicise a product, you gave reporters and columnists a red envelope stuffed with money and told them what they should write. Our mission was to explain that this might not work so well with Western reporters. Our audiences were sceptical to the point of laughing out loud on occasion.