Chinese Spy Who Pretended to Be a Woman

Under Xi Jinping, China has stepped up dark warnings about foreign spying. But it is just starting to reveal individual cases.

This month, Germany arrested a woman accused of passing information on flights and freight, including military equipment, to a Chinese spy. She worked at a logistics company that services sites such as Leipzig/Halle Airport.

Shi Pei Pu

The story of Shi Pei Pu, a Chinese opera singer who masqueraded as a woman in order to seduce a French diplomat and steal intelligence secrets for the Chinese Communist Party, is both tragic and romantic. Shi was born in 1938 and found early success as a Beijing opera performer. But her life took an unexpected turn when she met the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot in 1964 at a diplomatic party.

The two fell in love and started a clandestine relationship. They exchanged embassy secrets, which Shi transmitted to her handlers in Beijing while Boursicot was working in Mongolia and Ulan Bator. Their affair endured even as the Chinese Cultural Revolution was raging from 1966 to 1976, which forced Boursicot to relocate several times. But Boursicot continued to provide information to Shi through the years.

But the espionage wasn’t without its costs, as both Shi and Boursicot were convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to six-years in prison. Boursicot tried to paint Shi as psychologically unstable and mentally ill, but the jury didn’t buy his defense. The jury found both men guilty and sentenced them to prison.

During their trial, it emerged that Shi had convinced Boursicot for 20 years that he was a woman. He went to extraordinary lengths to hide his genitals and only had sex with Boursicot in the dark. He also claimed that he had given birth in Boursicot’s absence to their child, a boy named Shi Du Du. But it later came to light that the child was a Muslim minority Uighur whom Shi had simply adopted and given his name.

After his conviction, Shi lived in Paris where he continued to perform as an opera singer. He died in 2009 and is survived by his adopted son. Boursicot, who was pardoned by the French president Francois Mitterrand in 1987, kept in sporadic contact with Shi and his family through the years and continued to work as a diplomat. The pair’s complex affair is now known to the world through both a Broadway play and a film. The pair’s tale has become a metaphor for deception and the power of illusion, raising questions about sexual identity and challenging societal norms.

Bernard Boursicot

When Bernard Boursicot met Shi Pei Pu at a Christmas party in 1964, the wheels were set in motion for happily ever after. Shi was a beautiful Beijing opera singer who enraptured the heart of Boursicot, an accountant at the French Embassy in Communist-era China. They hit it off right away, and they started having a secret relationship.

Despite being an adult man, Shi was dressed like a woman and had bright eyes and feminine features that were sure to appeal to women as well as men. Boursicot was a brash, outgoing man with no fear of speaking his mind and he immediately fell for this wallflower Chinese woman. The two bonded over their love of music and began sharing secrets and personal details with one another.

Boursicot grew increasingly invested in his relationship with Shi and began passing sensitive documents to her. The pair continued to meet secretly for years, even through the Cultural Revolution and Boursicot’s various foreign postings. At some point, Shi manipulated her lover further by presenting him with a four-year-old boy named Shi Dudu, whom she claimed was their son.

In 1983, the pair was arrested on suspicion of spying for the Chinese government. Boursicot admitted to passing the documents and both were sentenced to six-year prison terms. Boursicot was released in 1986 and returned to France, where he was living with a male partner and his son. Shi was pardoned in 1987 and moved to Paris, where he continued to perform opera until his death at the age of 70.

Joyce Wadler, a journalist who investigated the story of this fascinating couple for her book Liaison, speculated that Boursicot believed Shi was a woman because she could retract her testicles, which gave her a feminine appearance. She also used a special ring to create the illusion of labial lips and a clitoris that allowed her to have superficial penetration with other men. She was able to convince Boursicot that she had female genitalia because of this. Boursicot, for his part, always insisted that he loved Shi.

Espionage

China’s spy agency has been warning young Chinese to watch out for “handsome guys and beautiful women” seeking to lure them into false romantic relationships to get information on the country’s behalf. The Ministry of State Security has been publishing a series of articles since last August on social media platform WeChat, urging people to be alert for foreign threats as Xi Jinping’s government prioritizes national security.

In one of the latest cases, the ministry said it had detained a woman and her husband for selling information on its railway network to a third party. The agency did not disclose the name of the party or the nature of the information sold, but it said that such acts were illegal and dangerous to national security. The couple was arrested in the southern city of Shenzhen, and their daughter, who was a minor at the time, has been removed from school.

The case against the pair is part of a wider campaign by China to crack down on foreign espionage, including hacking and human intelligence. Last year, lawmakers passed a broad update to anti-espionage law, which includes stricter penalties for anyone caught selling secrets. Beijing has long traded accusations of espionage with the United States and Britain, but it has only recently started disclosing details of alleged individual cases.

China continues to rely on old-fashioned human espionage to gather information. Its agents have been found in positions of power at the local and municipal levels, where they have a better chance to penetrate without the strict vetting procedures that apply to officials at the federal level.

In one of the most infamous cases, the US charged a man named Cheng Yueting with spying for China in 2021. He had set up a business as a male escort and recruited active-duty military officers, who he would then attempt to recruit into his own spy ring. The information he obtained included details of training exercises and the top-secret Gu-An combat plan, according to a federal indictment against him. The case exposed a widespread operation in which China recruited people to spy on its enemies for the Communist Party.

Love Story

In one of the most bizarre stories in the history of espionage, Chinese opera star Shi Pei Pu, who lived as a man and taught Chinese to diplomat wives, had a long-running affair with French embassy worker Bernard Boursicot. They were not only lovers, but Bouriscot acted as Shi’s conduit for passing on information about the French government to her superiors in Beijing and later in Ulan Bator. Shi even claimed to have birthed a child, and convinced Bouriscot that he was the father. The story was so outrageous that it inspired David Henry Hwang to write the 1988 Broadway play M. Butterfly, starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone in the film versions.

Shi was arrested on charges of espionage in 1986, but escaped prison and served time outside of China. She died in Paris in 1993.