Current Affairs

It’s been 29 days since Qin Gang disappeared, the Chinese Foreign Minister has not been seen since meeting envoys from Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Russia. Meetings were missed that made his disappearance noticeable, for instance Josep Borrell, the foreign minister of the European Union, Janet Yelland of the US Treasury and also a failure to attend the ASEAN Summit held in Jakarta.

So where is Qin Gang? The Wolf Warrior has it seems fallen foul of the party. The silence is deafening and where there is silence, there is intrigue. Journalists have asked the question… where is Qin Gang… daily and finally the answer came…. he is ill. Social media has been awash with gossip, the government have not stepped in to batten down the mediaraties who have conjectured what he has done wrong. Repeated questions about his whereabouts have been met with silence and so the gossip, conjecture and information vacuum add to the questions and unsubstantiated rumours of what has happened to him and what he has done wrong.

“It’s a very bad look for the PRC to have their foreign minister disappear for three weeks,” said Bill Bishop on his Sharp China Podcast.

“The absence of any information since his last appearance… fuels the rumours, from health to an affair and a child out of wedlock to being caught up in a spy case.”

Wang Wenbin, Qin Gong’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, insisted that she had “no understanding” of the rumours surrounding his disappearance.

It is not the first time that figures have disappeared, Jack Ma upset the party by splitting Alibaba into two and spent months in silent confinement, before re-appearing earlier this year. Jack Ma, was in trouble because he had accused Chinese banks of managing their business’ with the mentality of a “pawn shop”. He also criticised the party and authorities methods of managing the banking system who he accused of managing digital finance in the same way as managing a “railway station or airport.”

“There are CCP committees there to remind the companies… that the party ultimately has power, even powerful individuals like Jack Ma,” says Samantha Hoffman, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

What we know of Qin Gang is that he is married and has one son, he was ambassador to the United States and Britain, and had been moving up the party structure because of his popularity. We know his education and path into the civil service but everything after is a bit fuzzy, and there is very little information about his private life, other than conjecture that he has been having an affair.

According to the Washington Post, Qin has a huge number of enemies inside the government…[..] He was marginally talented person, who just being close with Xi, [was] catapulted up.”

The Washington Post thinks that Qin’s prolonged absence “may indicate that he is being set up to take the fall this time.” But the question is why he is being held and a trial has not been arranged. The rhetorical answer is that Qin may be brought up on charges that will allow Xi to get rid of him without establishing the charges that he will be brought up on, especially if the charge is an extra marital affair.

According to Jamie Sedel, writing for AU.com, the rumour is that Qin has been having an affair with Hong Kong based Phoenix TV personality FU Xiaotian. He goes on to claim that Fu had a baby nine months after Qin had been interviewed by her and that child is his. What makes this particularly difficult is that the gossip columns on the internet are that the name of the father is unknown, but Fu has commented on social media posts celebrating Qin’s birthday, and again when he was promoted to the Communist Party’s Central Committee.  

Of course the gossip is not substantiated by anybody or anything that could be called concrete, but rumours also argue that Qin has become caught up in a spy case, where someone he suggested to President Xi, was arrested for spying. So the question is what or who will take his place as foreign minister, or whether he will return. In many ways the silence surrounding the disappearance has led to intrigue, but there are also questions whether China will continue engaging in ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy or move towards a more conciliatory form of diplomacy.

Christopher Walker, writing in Foreign Affairs believes that China’s secrecy or limiting transparency and accountability is leading to a “gradual erosion of global norms of transparency and open government.” But what is going on is more than that, Xi does not seem to feel that China is compelled to answer questions of its top diplomat and in many ways this is reflective of the CCP’s own method of attaining secrecy, which itself forms arguments of how you manage and formulate a foreign policy directed at China.

James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary warned that there could be a tragic miscalculation unless Beijing lifts the veil of secrecy over its military and nuclear weapons expansion. But this is nothing new, China has always been a secretive state, even when the Covid pandemic broke out there were levels of secrecy before coming clean when cities were shut down.

Qin Gang for the moment has disappeared, how he reappears will be key to the West’s understanding of its own foreign policy towards China. His position has been taken up for the time being by Wang Yi, the question is how will Qin reappear. Will he appear on a podium handcuffed to a guard and charged with corruption or will he just reappear, with nothing said or argued and continue the confrontational diplomacy that China has followed since he sat at the table and argued China’s cause.