One complication here is that the whole spy-or-not distinction is far from clear-cut. One issue is that (IIUC: I'm not an expert) there's a murky distinction between "real" spies involved with spying for classified intelligence, sabotage and assassination and the like, and agents of influence who may restrict themselves to buttering up powerful people. Another is that if you're a China-based Chinese citizen like Alice Huang and one day the Chinese security services turn up out of the blue and ask you to tell then what you know about this or try to persuade someone else to do that, what are you going to do? So it may be possible to give different answers to the question without anyone outright lying.