MEDIA: Double Agents, Jazz and Revolution: Espionage in Old Shanghai

In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was unlike any city on earth. Home to three million + souls, it was a place where Art Deco towers rose alongside opium dens, where jazz drifted through streets crackling with revolutionary fervour, and where the fates of empires were quietly negotiated in smoke-filled back rooms. It was a city of extraordinary glamour and profound danger and it was one of the most fertile grounds for espionage the modern world has ever seen.

It is this electrifying moment in history that forms the centrepiece of Mark Logan's upcoming appearance as lead guest on a prominent spying and intelligence podcast. The episode explores how Shanghai's unique character - cosmopolitan, commercially vital, and politically combustible - made it a natural theatre for shadowy operators from across the ideological spectrum. Russian agents, many of whom would go on to shape the Cold War, were already cutting their teeth on the city's electric streets. Meanwhile, the bitter rivalry between the Kuomintang and the fledgling Chinese Communist Party played out against a backdrop that was equal parts glamorous and lethal.

Britain had enormous stakes in the city. Shanghai was home to the vast majority of the country's commercial investment in China, making it not merely a cultural curiosity but a strategic imperative.

Logan, a former MP and Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary China Group who conducted postgraduate research into China's ethnic minority policies and UK-China relations, brings considerable scholarly grounding to the discussion. He described the period as a moment when ideology, empire and espionage converged in a city quite unlike anywhere else on earth.