China’s abrupt removal of Qin Gang as the foreign minister did not stop the questions that had dogged Chinese officials in the month since he vanished from public view: Where is Qin? Does he have health issues? Is he under investigation?
Representatives of the foreign ministry have struggled to respond when pressed by reporters, repeatedly saying that they had no information to provide. After China replaced him on Tuesday, nearly all references to Qin were scrubbed from the ministry’s website, an unusual erasure that has only deepened the intrigue. On Thursday, asked by a reporter if China had been transparent about Qin’s ousting, a spokeswoman lashed out at what she called “malicious hype”.
For a department tasked with speaking to the outside world, the Chinese foreign ministry’s floundering response to the disappearance of one of its own top officials highlights the weakness of China’s diplomatic apparatus under President Xi Jinping. Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has concentrated power under himself and enforced secrecy in an already highly opaque system, no matter the cost to China’s international image.
Xi has diminished the sway of the Foreign Ministry, analysts say, as he’s pursued an increasingly assertive, and some say risky, foreign policy.
“The larger foreign ministry’s bureaucracy has been losing its influence over foreign policy for most of the Xi era, with decisions on key issues like Taiwan or the U.S. being made within the Party and dominated by Xi,” said Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Xi has presided over China’s worst bilateral relationship with the US in decades; he has aggressively pressed China’s claim over the self-governed island of Taiwan; and he remains committed to supporting Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine.
Xi is also responsible for Qin’s e, allowing him to overtake more experienced diplomats, in being named foreign minister late last year. “The basic parameters of Beijing’s foreign policy are pretty well fixed, and so a single personnel change, especially Qin Gang’s, won’t adjust this trajectory,” Blanchette said.
