Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) has not been seen in public for more than three weeks, despite a flurry of high-profile diplomatic efforts to repair ties with the US.
As a former ambassador to the US, who is considered a protege of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Qin had been expected to play a key role in a string of high-level visits by US officials, but his last public appearance was a meeting with his Sri Lankan counterpart in Beijing on June 25.
He did not join Chinese officials at talks with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen earlier this month, or as part of the ongoing visit by US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.
Photo: EPA-EFE / Xinhua / Zhang Ling
All high-level contacts between the two nations had been suspended for nearly a year, after then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August last year, making these trips particularly important.
Earlier this month Chinese officials also canceled a planned visit by High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, without giving a reason for the change of plan.
Qin last week was replaced as head of Beijing’s delegation to the ASEAN summit in Indonesia.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said at the time that Qin would not go “due to health reasons,” but gave no details.
A week on, he still has not reappeared and discussion about his absence appears to have been censored on the Chinese social media site Sina Weibo, with a search for “where is Qin Gang” on the platform returning the message “no results.”
There were very few other discussions visible under his name.
Journalist and analyst Phil Cunningham said five paragraphs about Qin were cut without notice from a piece he wrote about US-China relations for the pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
The paragraphs pointed out that it was an unfortunate time for a former ambassador to the US to disappear from the political scene and questioned whether it was due to illness or political disfavor.
“Qin Gang is missing. Not only is he missing from the news cycle in China, but he’s missing from my article!” Cunningham wrote on Twitter. “As run by the SCMP on 15 July, five sentences about Qin were removed (without notice) from the article after it was accepted for publication.”
Qin, 57, rose to prominence as one of the aggressive “wolf warriors” who brought a new, antagonistic style to Chinese diplomacy. Reportedly backed and promoted by Xi himself, he had been tipped to take over in future from Chinese Central Foreign Affairs Commission Director Wang Yi (王毅), the top foreign affairs official in the Chinese Communist Party.
The nation’s opaque political system means that it can be hard to gauge the cause of sudden disappearances by senior officials. They are sometimes a warning sign that a former power broker has fallen from political favor and their next appearance would be in court, but some breaks have a more mundane explanation, or at least do not affect careers.
Xi himself vanished from public view for two weeks shortly before being appointed leader in 2012, before reappearing to take up the post he was widely tipped for. No reason has ever been given for that brief absence.
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