Shi Pei Pu was a Beijing opera singer and librettist whose 20-year affair with a French embassy employee created the sex-and-espionage scandal which inspired David Henry Hwang to dramatise his remarkable life story in the play, and film, M. Butterfly.

Shi Pei Pu was born in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong in 1938, the youngest of three children, and the only son of his university professor father and schoolteacher mother. Shi’s family soon moved to the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, and here he aquired a good command of the French language, later graduating with a university degree in literature.

In the late 1950s Shi became a singer with the Beijing opera but by his mid-twenties he was working as a librettist, writing plays about the Chinese proletariat, a group newly glorified following the Communists’ assumption of power in 1949.

Besides his work for the opera, Shi was informally employed as a teacher of Chinese at the French diplomatic mission in Beijing, and it was thanks to this connection, in 1964, that the 26-year-old Shi met and began an affair with Bernard Boursicot, a 20-year-old embassy accounts clerk.

Though appearing in public always as a man, Shi had persuaded Boursicot that he was in fact a woman, forced to assume a male identity since childhood in order to avoid disgracing his parents, who had produced only female children. The inexperienced Boursicot, who until then had engaged in only homosexual sex at his French boarding school, believed Shi’s story. The couple’s sex life, said Boursicot, was always conducted furtively, in haste and in the dark.

In late 1965, before Boursicot’s departure for an embassy posting outside China, Shi announced that he was pregnant; on Boursicot’s return in 1967, Shi claimed that he had borne a son, Shi Du Du, who was being cared for by relatives outside Beijing. Boursicot accepted that the boy was his own, giving him the French name of Bertrand.

With the Cultural Revolution under way, it had become dangerous for Chinese nationals to meet foreigners unofficially, but Shi, now a member of the Writers’ Association, obtained permission to receive Boursicot at his home twice a week “to study the thoughts of Chairman Mao”. Boursicot was soon approached by the Chinese secret service agent Kang Sheng, who had learnt of his relationship with Shi and drawn the obvious conclusion. Kang offered the Frenchman a bargain: the visits could continue, provided Boursicot supplied him, via Shi, with secret embassy documents.

Boursicot, concerned for Shi’s safety and not without his own communist sympathies, agreed. Though now working as an embassy archivist, Boursicot had no access to any highly sensitive information, but nonetheless, over the next 18 years, he managed to pass to Shi perhaps as many as 150 documents, which seemed useful to the Chinese. At the same time the apolitical Shi demanded and received from Boursicot a continuing supply of luxury foreign goods.

On Boursicot’s return to Paris in the early 1980s, he arranged for Shi to visit him, with the boy Bertrand, on a three-month cultural visa. Though a minor heart attack almost prevented Shi from making the trip, he eventually arrived in October 1982.

Boursicot introduced Bertrand as his own son, presenting Shi, still dressed as a man, as the boy’s uncle. Shi quickly ingratiated himself among the Chinese émigré community and in fashionable left-wing Parisian circles, performing extracts from traditional Beijing operas, and even appearing on French television. On the strength of this cultural work, his temporary visa was extended for a year, during which time he and Bertrand continued to live at Boursicot’s home, together with Boursicot’s male lover.

The lengthy stay of a Communist Chinese national with a former embassy employee aroused the suspicions of the authorities, and in the summer of 1983 both men were arrested and investigated. Boursicot was charged with delivering information to foreign agents, and Shi with complicity in the same.

During the months of questioning which followed, Boursicot learnt at last that Shi, the supposed mother of his child, was in fact a man: Shi had demonstrated to prison doctors how he had been able to conceal his genitals, forming a bodily indentation which allowed for shallow penetration. Shi Du Du, alias Bertrand, was revealed to have been bought from a doctor in Xinjiang province, who had himself bought the boy from his Uighur mother. “It was not that my mother did not love me,” the boy told French police. “We were starving.”

On learning the truth about Shi and his supposed son, the distraught Boursicot attempted to commit suicide by slashing his throat with a razor.

In May 1986 Shi and Boursicot were sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for espionage, but after serving only 11 months, both were pardoned by President François Mitterrand: the information passed to the Chinese had not proved important after all. After his release, Shi remained in Paris, appearing in minor productions of traditional Beijing opera.

In 1988 the Chinese-American dramatist David Henry Hwang turned the story of Shi’s extraordinary relationship with Boursicot into a Broadway play, M. Butterfly, an awardwinner starring Anthony Hopkins. Hwang subsequently adapted the play for a 1993 film of the same name, directed by David Cronenberg, with Jeremy Irons as Boursicot and John Lone as Shi. In the same year, having secured Boursicot’s co-operation, the New Yorker Joyce Wadler published her novel Liaison: The True Story of the M. Butterfly Affair.

Notified of Shi’s death at the nursing home where he now lives, the 64-year-old Boursicot remarked: “He acted so badly towards me. It would be stupid to pretend that I am sad.”

Shi Pei Pu is survived by his de facto son, Shi Du Du (Bertrand).

Shi Pei Pu, Beijing opera singer, librettist and spy, was born on December 21, 1938. He died on June 30, 2009, aged 70