Yang Tengbo isn’t just a Chinese ‘spy’ – he’s far more interesting than that

No citizen of the People’s Republic acquires the status and wealth which he boasts without approval or instructions from on high, writes China expert Michael Sheridan. He may be a man in a suit, but behind him stands the authority of the party and the army

There is at least one line of truth in the statement by Yang Tengbo, the Chinese man named as the confidant of Prince Andrew barred from entering Britain on security grounds.

“The widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue,” he said.

He is far more interesting than that. Yang is an example of a modern asset to his country. You could call him a hybrid warrior, an agent of influence or just an elite lobbyist. Spies are servants but Yang is, or was, a player.

Not for him the fieldcraft of hanging around a car park waiting for a data memory stick of interest to the Ministry of State Security. Why rummage in the dustbins when you can walk through the palace gate?

Espionage today comes in many cloaks and the Chinese state is adept at exploiting the weakness of its foes. To be able to read your opponent across a cultural divide is a skill granted to very few in the trade. To get forewarning of their thoughts is a gift.

The task of patriots like Yang is not to steal secrets. It is to influence their targets, to absorb their worries, to soften their impressions of a hostile regime and to create the conditions for appeasement and hesitation in a crisis.

The China assignment is dead clear: divide the democracies, split their alliances, make gullible politicians think there is something in it for them and pull every lever to win over the elites to the idea that nothing is worth fighting for. This calls for subtle talents.

The finest practitioners in recent history, like Stalin’s agent Richard Sorge in Japan and Mossad’s man in Damascus, Eli Cohen, were supremely valuable as manipulators (although both ended up on the gallows).

It did not surprise me to see Yang in a photograph with Liu Xiaoming, the former Chinese ambassador to Britain, who struck our own spies as the most effective foreign envoy in London during his years at the Court of St James’s.

It was likely through him that Yang first came to the attention of the security services, who knew the ambassador as a longtime agent handler and as a hard case called on by Beijing to do its hatchet work in the Middle East.

Those years marked the “golden era” in which I watched British cabinet ministers dance attendance on Liu during a visit to China by David Cameron in 2013 at the height of Western naivete about the Communist party-state.

At the end of that trip, as it happened, I sat behind Liu in a first class airplane seat from Chengdu to Beijing where he was greeted with nervous deference by minders as soon as the doors opened. This was no regular ambassador.

Liu has been rewarded – if that is the word – with a job close to Xi Jinping as the Chinese leader’s special envoy to North Korea. That does not call for white-glove diplomacy but since one of Liu’s earlier jobs was ambassador in Pyongyang, he is used to whatever it takes.

People who survive in the court of Xi usually have a core of steel and, no doubt by coincidence, Prince Andrew’s friend Yang Tengbo comes from an army family with ties to the southwestern military region of China, a cat’s cradle of fealty, promotions and loyalties linking veterans of the revolution and their heirs.

That counts for trust inside the Chinese system. Yang’s family ties will have been carefully combed by state security and his place in the power network secured by bonds invisible to outsiders.

No citizen of the People’s Republic acquires the status and wealth which he boasts without approval or instructions from on high. He may be a man in a suit but behind him stands the authority of the party and the army.

If it did not, he would have been cut down from privileged interactions with elite foreigners long ago on the grounds of excessive presumption. Xi Jinping has felled far mightier figures who got above themselves.

It fits the hybrid profile that Yang even did a brief stint at the BBC. Getting on with the cosmopolitan Western media is an asset: Xi Jinping’s purged foreign minister, Qin Gang, worked for an American news agency in Beijing and his wife was an assistant in the office of The Times. The couple graduated from a university where bright prospects are groomed by the Ministry of State Security.

Watching the progress and now presumably the eclipse of Yang Tengbo, observers of modern China will digest two takeaways.

One is that nothing in the People’s Republic is private – everything is at the behest of the party-state and therefore distinctions between the personal and political realms are meaningless.

The other is that the deep state in China is a beast of patience and scope; it is willing to waste time and treasure on useless frivolities if just one of them comes to serve its purpose. Put not your trust in princes, but use them where you may.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of ‘The Red Emperor’, published by Headline Press