Life used to be so much easier for spy writers in the West. White guys wandered around Europe, or perhaps as far as Istanbul, maybe Cairo, or a remote Chinese treaty port and mostly followed other white guys up dark alleys and through hotel lobbies. Occasionally a white woman appeared, either in distress or as a ‘honeytrap’. There were codes, dead letter drops, invisible ink. An Englishman with decent German could pretty much stroll around Berlin’s Tiergarten undetected. Amateur accidental spies, like those of the popular Eric Ambler novels of the 1930s, could survive on little more than a phrase book and a well-thumbed Baedeker guide. Real-life pre-war Soviet agents like Richard Sorge and Ursula Kuczynski could confidently mingle in privileged cosmopolitan circles as far afield as Tokyo and Shanghai. There was a little glamour to the trade.

Authors in the espionage genre continued to have it easy in the subsequent Cold War too. Mostly their characters, like Ian Fleming’s Bond or most of John le Carré’s anti-heroes, were upper middle class, Oxbridge or Ivy League educated, affiliated with MI6 or the CIA and dashing. Or, alternatively, they’d been pulled up kicking and screaming from the ranks, like Len Deighton’s cheeky spy of dubious background, Harry Palmer. The issue of languages was easy enough to circumvent—stints with the diplomatic service overseas; Bond and his First from Cambridge in Oriental Languages (at least in the movies); Harry Palmer’s colloquial German learnt slumming on the Berlin black market. And pretty much everyone—spy and spied upon—was European or American.

• Tags: China, Issue 29, Paul French