SNA (Tokyo) -- The media and their police sources are calling it a case of “espionage,” but the facts that have so far come to light are much more suggestive of financial corruption than of a new chapter of the James Bond franchise.

The known facts, briefly, are that a 45-year-old first secretary in the Chinese embassy named Li Chunguang used his old student ID card in 2009 to open bank accounts without declaring his current status as a Chinese diplomat. This was a violation of the Vienna Convention, especially as these personal bank accounts were later used to receive payments from Japanese companies.

The other notable point about Li is that he had lived in Japan off-and-on since the mid-1990s, was fluent in the language, and dealt smoothly with the upper classes. His affiliations even reach as high as the University of Tokyo and the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management. He seems to have had particularly strong contacts with the political circles surrounding the Agriculture Ministry and was involved in major agricultural exchange projects between Japan and China.

A couple of weeks ago, the Japanese police, who were aware of his illegal bank accounts and the money he received, decided to move forward and question Li directly. That interview never happened because the Chinese embassy quickly shipped him back to his home country.

As Michael Cucek of the Shisaku blog was the first to point out, the “spy” narrative doesn’t really make any sense. If Li was a spy working for Chinese intelligence services, what would be the utility of opening illegal personal bank accounts using his old student ID? Are the Chinese state intelligence services so impoverished that they force their spies to take major risks to obtain their own operations money?

The much more obvious scenario is that Li used his old student ID in order to keep a secret from his own government. By leveraging his contacts with Japanese businessmen eager to get the inside track when doing trade with China, Li was likely in the process of building his own personal nest egg away from the eyes of his own masters. With his exceptional ability to deal with Japanese people on their own terms, he probably thought his scam would work out just fine.

What Li seems to have failed to realize, however, is that the Japanese police had flagged him as a potential spy ever since he returned to the country as an economic attaché in 2007 and were keeping an eye on him. At some point, the police noticed his illegal bank accounts. If this scenario is correct, the game was up for Li a couple of weeks ago when the police informed the Chinese embassy about their investigation of his bank accounts. It was probably at this point that the Chinese government got wise to Li’s gambit and yanked him back to Beijing.

But even if the Li case in fact has nothing to do with Chinese espionage in Japan, it is already clear that every ruling party politician who had anything to do him while he was operating on official embassy business is going to get tarred with the brush of being potential traitors to the nation.

At present, the opposition and the conservative media is targeting Agriculture Minister Michihiko Kano and Senior Vice-Minister Nobutaka Tsutsui, who both had the misfortune of dealing with Mr. Li.

Even Jin Matsubara, the deeply conservative National Public Safety Commission chairman and ruling party lawmaker, is going to use this opportunity to push for tough new anti-espionage legislation.

Shingetsu News Agency