DEVOTEE WORKS JUST YARDS FROM MI6 SPIES

OUTWARDLY at least, the British consulate in Shanghai – at 17F Garden Square – appears wholly unremarkable. There is little to distinguish it from the other high-rise buildings that crowd the city’s historic riverside district. What goes on inside, however, is quite a different matter.

One consular official identified in the leaked database is said by security sources to work near to a team of MI6 officers operating under diplomatic cover. Intriguingly, and some critics of the China’s regime may think worryingly too, the official is apparently on the floor below or, as one security source put it, ‘down a staircase’. There is no evidence that anything untoward has taken place, but the simple fact that a Chinese Communist Party member is working in close proximity to intelligence officers has in itself given rise to concerns that the UK is ‘playing with fire’.

Long known as a city of intrigue, Shanghai was fabled in the 1930s as the Paris of the East, China’s most modern metropolis, a haven for gangsters and intellectuals, colonials and radicals, the new rich and the ultra-poor.

The communist revolution changed all that and the city’s famous vitality was largely stamped out. Even in the late 1980s, when other parts of China were modernising fast, Shanghai lagged behind.

Now its appearance is positively futuristic. The skyscrapers in the gleaming financial district Pudong, for instance, dwarf the old colonial waterfront across the Huangpu river.

One senior Whitehall security source claimed: ‘In that station [the official] will be sat one floor away from the security services team.

‘ In theory, anybody walking past where the official works and up the staircase could be i dentified as an i ntelligence officer and that information passed back to the Communist Party.’