Get free Chinese policy and policy updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email every morning, summarizing the latest Chinese political and political news.
Qin Gang has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the brutal world of China’s elite politics, overtaking more experienced candidates for Xi Jinping’s foreign minister post in March before disappearing suddenly and without explanation.
With Qin out of public view for a month, analysts, diplomats and officials are trying to make sense of his absence, which threatens to complicate US efforts to revive engagement at the highest levels and China’s attempt to restore foreign confidence in its economy.
“For other countries, it doesn’t matter why he’s gone. “It’s the fact that he left that hampers diplomacy with China,” said Neil Thomas, an expert on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a US think tank. “The time Qin Gang spends away from the public eye is extremely unusual.”
Qin’s last public meetings were on June 25, according to the State Department’s website. The ministry blamed “health reasons” for his absence from a Southeast Asian regional meeting this month.
Qin’s disappearance comes as Xi prepares for a possible meeting with Joe Biden in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in the US. Last month, during the US Secretary of State’s visit to China, Qin spent five and a half hours with Antony Blinken. Beijing has said other officials would assume Qin’s responsibilities, and his predecessor Wang Yi, a member of the party’s elite 24-member Politburo, has maintained a busy schedule of meetings with foreign delegates in recent weeks.
Bonnie Glaser, China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said his absence will not affect US-China relations in the long term because the Secretary of State implements, not dictates, foreign policy in the Chinese system. However, she said it could have short-term repercussions, noting that Blinken had invited Qin to visit Washington when they met in Beijing.
“Obviously this is on hold until there is more clarity on whether or when Qin will return to his position. So that’s an obvious example of the impact on US-China relations,” Glaser said. “Wang Yi can only do two people’s work for so long.”
As Beijing’s envoy to Washington from 2021 to 2023 – a time of historic bilateral tensions – Qin had a difficult time. The Biden administration kept him at a distance, partly because it saw him as uninterested in stabilizing relations. While he was granted occasional meetings with White House and State Department officials, he had almost no contact with cabinet secretaries and had trouble socializing on Capitol Hill.
A diplomat familiar with the matter said Qin was “barred” in Washington, partly in retaliation for not allowing US Ambassador to China Nick Burns access. He has also been branded by some as one of Xi’s “Wolf Warriors,” a cadre of diplomats known for pulling out the tongues of their counterparts.
Qin’s Washington interlocutors said the ambassador focused on corporate groups looking to improve their profits in China and visited US states like Iowa where sentiment toward China was weaker.
US officials often negotiated directly with Xie Feng, Beijing’s former top American affairs official. Qin and Xie – who succeeded Qin as ambassador to Washington that year – didn’t like each other, people familiar with the situation said. Despite his close ties to Xi, Qin has often been passed over by his superiors in Beijing when dealing with the US, according to several people familiar with the situation.
Despite Qin’s troubles in Washington, he was promoted to foreign minister and, until just a few weeks ago, was considered by analysts to be one of Xi’s most trusted advisers on international issues. He reportedly caught the President’s attention while serving as the State Department’s director of protocol between 2014 and 2017. “There is no clearer captain name in the current leadership than Qin Gang,” said Asia Society’s Thomas, alluding to his rapid rise.
The length of Qin’s absence is highly unusual and indicates serious problems with his health or political standing, according to analysts. “The system is based on the idea that the party is always strong. When something isn’t going right, they don’t know what to do,” said Alex Payette, CEO of Cercius Group, a consulting firm specializing in China’s elite politics.
Qin graduated from Beijing University of International Relations, which trains intelligence officers and diplomats. According to several Chinese officials and foreign diplomats, the school is under the Ministry of State Security, China’s powerful spy agency.
Before his overseas assignments, which included about a decade in London, he worked as a news assistant for the American news agency United Press International, according to journalists who knew him. Like most message assistants at the time, he was assigned the task by the Domestic Service Bureau, which took instructions from the MSS. Qin attended weekly meetings where news assistants shared information about their media employers and received instructions on how to influence their work.
Recommended
With Qin’s fate unknown, the information blackout has fueled Beijing’s wild rumor mill, ranging from chronic illnesses and marital affairs to official investigations. Details of his whereabouts may become clear at an emergency meeting of leaders of the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, on Tuesday night, noted NPC Observer, a website that monitors China’s parliament and was founded by Changhao Wei, a Yale Law School fellow.
Even if Qin returns unharmed, the handling of his absence has raised questions about transparency at a crucial moment for the government.
As China struggles to recover from the pandemic and draconian lockdowns, “Beijing is trying to convince the world that the focus is now on the economy,” Thomas said. “But this episode just shows that politics still call the shots.”
Additional reporting by James Kynge and Eleanor Olcott in London