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 been long fascinated by China and developed a deep love of the country, even considering studying Chinese at university.
