Spies, trade and tech: China’s relationship with Britain

WHEN JOHN Le Carré joined MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, in the 1950s, long before finding fame as a spy novelist, his first job was not hunting the KGB. He was given the humdrum task of monitoring Commonwealth students in London. Chinese spies were thought to be using ethnically Chinese Singaporean and Malay students to gather industrial intelligence. It was not the most glamorous job. Le Carré was “dismayed”, recalls his biographer, to find that MI5’s China experts were “elderly retired missionaries with an imperfect command of the language”.