Taipei | After China’s leader, Xi Jinping, catapulted Qin Gang into the post of foreign minister in December, Qin set a frantic pace, meeting dozens of foreign officials as he pressed Beijing’s agenda in a divided, war-stricken world.
Then Qin went silent.
He has not made a public appearance in almost four weeks. His last reported engagements were on June 25, when he held talks with diplomats from Vietnam, Russia and Sri Lanka.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang in Beijing in June. AP
He was scheduled to meet the foreign policy chief of the European Union in Beijing, but China cancelled that visit. Last week, he missed a meeting of South-East Asian countries in Jakarta, Indonesia, to which China was invited.
Outside China, Qin’s lengthy absence has set off speculation about his health and status. Abrupt disappearances of senior Chinese officials from public life are often seen as potential signs of trouble. The mystery has seeped into conversations among diplomats and political insiders in the Chinese capital.
The Chinese government has acknowledged that Qin, 57, would skip the Jakarta meeting, citing health reasons, but it has otherwise declined to give any details or updates.
In Beijing, reporters have repeatedly asked the foreign ministry questions such as when Qin would return to work, only to be told that officials had “no information” to provide.
Secrecy from the government has only fuelled the speculation over Qin’s absence, threatening to distract from China’s efforts to power up its diplomacy to ease tensions with Western powers and court Asian neighbours.
The episode “is embarrassing and unsettling to Chinese diplomats because of the uncertainty it injects in a system that is tightly controlled,” says Daniel Russel, a former senior American diplomat now at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“For foreign diplomats, it raises even more questions about the bureaucratic weight of China’s foreign ministry.”
In China, disappearances of senior officials, celebrities and businesspeople are commonplace. It often emerges they have become embroiled in investigations or other controversies.
In February, investment banker Bao Fan, known for his work with the country’s rising tech companies, went missing after his company, China Renaissance, said it had been unable to contact him. A week later, the firm admitted Bao was co-operating with an “investigation”.
Among other prominent cases, the former Chinese head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, disappeared while travelling in China in 2018. In 2020, he was sentenced to more than 13 years in jail by a Chinese court for taking more than $US2 million ($2.9 million) in bribes.
Tennis star Peng Shuai also vanished from public view in 2021 after she accused a former Chinese vice-premier of sexual misconduct. She later reappeared and denied her own allegations, saying her social media posts on the issue were a misunderstanding.
It remains quite plausible that Qin fell ill and is recovering. Even so, the episode would be a telling example of how the party’s aversion to sharing bad news can undermine its efforts to control the narrative.
“Secrecy is the chosen mode of operation because for the Chinese Communist Party, information is a weapon,” says Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a research institute in Washington.
“But in this case, the mystery surrounding such an important official … is mind-boggling.”
Speculation of an affair
Should it turn out that Qin somehow ran afoul of the Communist Party’s leadership, it could also reflect poorly on Xi, who has used his dominance to fast-track the rise of Qin and a cohort of other loyalist officials, Lam said.
“Qin Gang was an official who, we like to say, took a helicopter ride to the top,” he says.
Qin was appointed China’s ambassador to Washington in July 2021 and, after only 17 months, was promoted to foreign minister, a rapid ascent that marked him out as one of Xi’s trusted lieutenants.
Before that, Qin served as a foreign ministry spokesman – known for his acerbic barbs – and as a senior protocol officer who organised Chinese leaders’ trips abroad, a role that gave him a chance to work closely with Xi.
As foreign minister, Qin has been responsible for implementing the Chinese leader’s vision of Beijing as an increasingly confident global power. In June, he met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Beijing, as the two nations sought to ease tensions.
Then Qin skipped the South-East Asian meeting, with China sending Wang Yi, an official who ranks above Qin in the party hierarchy, in his place.
As questions have mounted over Qin’s extended absence, overseas Chinese commentators have offered theories that an affair with a television personality might be behind his problems, and the speculation has become big news in Taiwan.
“It’s not implausible he’s been sidelined for health reasons,” says Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
“The longer he’s absent, the more likely there’s some other much more serious reason for him not being able to appear in public.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Bloomberg