The Story of a Chinese Spy Who Pretended to Be a Woman

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Zheng Pingru was a young, beautiful and glamorous opera star. She was a local celebrity and her picture graced the cover of a magazine.

She also had an important job – as a Chinese spy. This was one of the strangest cases in history, and the story inspired the Broadway show M. Butterfly.

What Happened?

For nearly 20 years, a Chinese opera singer and spy convinced his lover that he was a woman. It was a case of love and betrayal, a story that inspired David Henry Hwang to write the 1988 Broadway play M. Butterfly and earned starring roles for Jeremy Irons and John Lone. But the real life case of Shi Pei Pu was much more complicated than a Hollywood production. The saga of a man, his wife, and their child became one of the strangest and most controversial in the history of international espionage.

The story begins with Shi Pei Pu, a man who had modest local fame as an opera singer in Beijing, where he was known for his female roles. When he met Bernard Boursicot, who worked as an accountant at the French embassy in Beijing, in 1964, they hit it off and embarked on a long-term romance. During the years of their relationship, Shi convinced Boursicot that she was a woman and they even had a child.

During this time, the couple was also secretly providing information to the Chinese government. Boursicot shared documents from the French embassies in Moscow and Washington (the Cold War was raging at this point) with Shi, and after leaving his job at the embassy, he began sharing more information with her from the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

It was during this period of time that the ruse started to unravel. For one, the Cultural Revolution was in full swing and it would soon become impossible for Boursicot to travel freely around China. The couple was forced to move from place to place and revert to long-distance communication. This also limited their sexual activity.

In 1983, the Direction de la Surveillance du territoire realised they had been duped and both Boursicot and Shi were arrested for espionage. They were both sentenced to prison and served their time before being released.

Today, the story of a Chinese spy who pretended to be a woman is less about love and betrayal and more about national security. In recent years, cybersecurity researchers have discovered a massive espionage campaign originating in China targeting construction, engineering, aerospace, and technology companies in the United States for the benefit of the Chinese government. This includes the theft of proprietary data and intellectual property from companies in telecommunications, medical devices, semiconductor manufacturing, and machine learning.

Why Was He Pretending to Be a Woman?

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) has one of the world’s largest state intelligence apparatuses, and its spies operate around the globe. While most of this espionage involves collecting information on companies or scientists, the Chinese government also seeks to cultivate influence and limit criticism of its policies abroad.

As a result, it often recruits Chinese students who are studying abroad to spy on Beijing’s behalf. These students often report back to Beijing about their fellow ethnic Chinese students, rather than sensitive military or scientific data. Some of these high-profile cases, like the case of Chicago graduate student Ji Chaoqun who was convicted of acting illegally as an agent for the Chinese government, have received extensive media coverage.

The case of the chinese spy who pretended to be a woman illustrates just how far the MSS will go to get what it wants, even if it means deceiving its targets and sacrificing their trust in the process. While many of these spies act remotely, there are also examples of people running Chinese “overseas police stations” to monitor and harass critics of the government.

In this case, the ring leader was former Army servicemember-cum-businessman Chen Yu-hsin, who reportedly began his work for the MSS sometime in 2021. He recruited Army Major Hsiao Hsiang-yun, a former chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear officer who had recently retired from the army. He convinced Hsiao to join the gang by offering him money and promising to help him if war broke out between Taiwan and mainland China.

After he joined the ring, Hsiao helped to recruit more active-duty officers. He used his connections in the military to gain access to their posts, where he would take photos of sensitive equipment and steal classified documents. He then sent the information to the ring leader via encrypted messaging app Telegram.

Other junior members of the ring were more focused on gathering military intelligence at their posts. For example, one member who was allegedly stationed at an Army base near Taichung, where the ring operated, took photographs of military deployment plans and copied documents related to mobilization orders.

How Did He Do It?

The long-running affair between a Chinese opera singer who pretended to be a man and a French diplomat resulted in one of the strangest cases of international spying in history. The story inspired both a Broadway musical and a film, and it continues to inspire cultural discussion. It also illustrates how political climate can affect personal relationships and how deception is sometimes used for both economic and political reasons.

The relationship between Shi Pei Pu and Bernard Boursicot spanned decades. They met in the Forbidden City in 1978 on a cultural visa and quickly fell in love. While Boursicot was at the French embassy in Moscow and then in Washington during the Cold War, he passed information to Shi through his contacts at the embassy. He would later say that Shi had a “delicate and feminine” appearance and was able to seduce him easily with her “beautiful smile.”

Although the two were convicted of spying in 1986, they were pardoned in 1987. Shi died in 2009 and Bouriscot is now in a nursing home. They were a couple that exemplified the complex and often deceitful nature of relationships between foreign nationals in China and abroad.

Since the 1980s, a number of cases have illustrated how Chinese collectors have obtained a wide range of commercial and military information for their government. These incidents can be divided into three categories:

The first is economic espionage that involves the theft of valuable intellectual property and is often part of a large-scale campaign targeting many countries. The second category involves obtaining politically sensitive and strategic information for the benefit of the Chinese state. The third category involves gaining access to information for other reasons, such as bribery or blackmail. These are typically one-off or localized incidents, but in some cases have involved long-running covert efforts.

What Happened to Him?

The love affair between a Chinese opera singer and a French diplomat is one of the strangest international espionage stories in recent history. It inspired the Broadway show M. Butterfly, but both the spy and his lover were convicted of espionage in 1986.

Shi Pei Pu, who later died in a Paris nursing home, had become locally famous as a male Beijing opera singer. But he told Bernard Boursicot, who worked for the French Embassy in China, that he was really a woman who had been forced to dress and act like a man against his will.

After the pair met at a Christmas party in 1964, Boursicot agreed to meet Shi regularly for sex and to trade information on behalf of his country with her. By the end of their clandestine relationship, he had reportedly handed over documents covering the years 1969 through 1972 and 1977 through 1979.

Under Mao Zedong’s Communist Party rule, it was not legal for Chinese people to mix with foreigners. But, as the pair continued to have sex under cover of darkness, Shi was able to convince Boursicot that he really was a woman by hiding his genitals and wearing women’s clothing when in public. He even adopted a child and presented him as their son.

When their affair ended in 1983, both were arrested on charges of espionage. Boursicot had admitted to giving information to the Chinese and also to having a four-year-old daughter by a former lover. Shi was also convicted of espionage, and both he and Boursicot served time in prison.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party operates a sprawling influence and interference network across the United States. Newsweek’s extensive research has uncovered hundreds of organizations that are part of this network, including many with direct links to the CCP itself. Some of these groups knowingly help the CCP, while others may not realize that they are aiding the Chinese government. Nevertheless, they are all contributing to the growing power of the Chinese state. Our investigation of this vast network is ongoing. Stay tuned for more in-depth reporting on these secretive operations.