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Opaque China still silent on disappeared foreign minister, said to be demoted to low-level publishing job

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(TibetanReview.net, Sep12’24) – In a possible indication that he had been removed from power and disappeared from public view not for any criminal responsibility but for a widely reported moral misbehaviour, washingtonpost.com Sep 8 reported that former Foreign Minister Qin Gang of China has been nominally assigned to a low-level job at a publishing house affiliated with the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The report said Qin, 58, once the face of China’s so-called “wolf diplomacy”, now works, at least on paper, for the World Affairs Press, a state-owned publishing house under the Foreign Ministry.

While this claim, attributed to two former US officials, remains to be confirmed, the report said this information sets at rest wild rumours such as that Qin had been imprisoned or had Killed himself and so forth.

One of the former officials has said Qin is “not going to jail, but his career is over.”

While some are sceptical about the Washington Post report, others see it as evidence of uncertainty and impermanence within the political system directed by the Communist Party of China (CPC), noted voanews.com Sep 10.

Before he disappeared from public view in July last year without any explanation, Qin was the youngest foreign minister since the founding of the CPC.

Qin, a President Xi Jinping loyalist, was promoted to foreign minister at record speed. At 56, he was tapped not just as minister, but also elevated to state councillor, a senior position that Wang Yi, Qin’s predecessor, achieved only at age 65, after five years as foreign minister.

His rapid rise irked colleagues, who saw him as leapfrogging others, the washingtonpost.com report cited Christopher K Johnson, a former senior CIA China analyst and now the head of China Strategies Group, a consultancy, as saying.

A leading theory among Chinese political analysts is that Qin was removed because he had an affair with Fu Xiaotian, a prominent Chinese television journalist, and that the pair had a child born out of wedlock in the United States, said the voanews.com report.

Official Chinese media reports appeared to be consistent with this contention. He was never reported arrested or put under investigation. During a top-level political meeting in July, the Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee, the CPC was reported to have agreed to Qin’s request that he be removed from his post as a member of the Central Committee of the CPC. That followed an official announcement in February that said Qin had resigned as a parliamentary deputy.

The Washingtonpost.com report still remains to be confirmed. The voanews.com report said a reporter from The Washington Post recently visited the bookstore of the World Affairs Press in Beijing, but employees there told the newspaper that they had not heard that Qin worked at the publishing house. A staff member who answered the phone said she did not know if the news was true. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment, the report said.

The report cited some observers as pointing out that the Washington Post report is based on an anonymous source who has left office, and the authenticity still needs to be verified.

Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis, has said on social media platform X, “The rumours of Qin Gang moving to World Affairs Press have been around for months. Sources are US ex-officials and I don’t know what they do. But @nakashimae & @cdcshepherd are top reporters,” referring to the two Washington Post news story reporters.

Last December, online news outlet Politico suggested that Qin had been arrested for undermining national security and was tortured to death or committed suicide, noted the voanews.com report.

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