Questions continue to swirl around China’s ‘disappeared’ foreign minister

More than a year after China’s former foreign minister, Qin Gang, disappeared from public view, raising a host of questions, the Chinese government remains silent on his whereabouts.
A new report this week from The Washington Post, citing two former U.S. government officials, suggests Qin has been spared any jail time and now is nominally holding a low-ranking position at a publishing house under the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Earlier reports speculated that he was sentenced to life in prison or had died from suicide or torture.
Some are skeptical about the Washington Post report, while others see it as evidence of uncertainty and impermanence within the political system directed by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP.
According to Sunday’s Washington Post report, Qin, 58, now works, at least on paper, for the World Affairs Press, a state-owned publishing house under the Foreign Ministry.
One of the former officials said Qin is “not going to jail, but his career is over.”
Before he disappeared from public view in July of last year, Qin was the youngest foreign minister since the founding of the CCP. 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.
Some reports suggested that the Chinese government suspected Fu of sharing state secrets with foreign intelligence agencies, but these rumors have never been confirmed. Like Qin, Fu disappeared from public life for more than a year ago.
During a top-level political meeting in July, the Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee, the CCP agreed to Qin’s request that he be removed from his post as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Chinese state media reported. That followed an official announcement in February that said Qin had resigned as a parliamentary deputy.
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.
Some observers pointed out that the Washington Post’s 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 Center for China Analysis, said on social media platform X, “The rumors of Qin Gang moving to World Affairs Press have been around for months. Sources are U.S. ex-officials and I don’t know what they do. But @nakashimae & @cdcshepherd are top reporters.”
Charles Smith, an encryption security expert, said on X that he doesn’t believe the article, which “even notes the ‘bookstore’ employees have never seen Qin. … He’s on an extended fishing vacation.” His tweet was accompanied by an image of a skeleton fishing underwater.
Last December, online news outlet Politico reported that Qin had been arrested for undermining national security and was tortured to death or committed suicide.
Yen-Ting, an X user who frequently comments on China’s social and political issues, tweeted, “It’s almost poetic justice, a ‘Wolf Warrior’ reduced to selling books while the regime’s whispers suggest he’s paid off the hook rather than locked up. This is China’s way of dealing w/ its wayward wolves: not through the claws of justice but by shoving them into obscurity.”
Kalpit A. Mankikar, a fellow in the Strategic Studies Program with the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, tweeted, “Once seen as Stalin’s heir, Soviet politician Georgy Malenkov fell from grace and was banished to Kazakhstan to manage a power plant. In #China, ex-foreign minister Qin Gang seems to have rehabilitated at a Party-run bookshop, says @washingtonpost.”
The Washington Post report also quoted current and former U.S. officials who had dealt with Qin as saying he lacked the diplomatic skills of his experienced colleagues to break out of the “Wolf Warrior” model.
One example is that Qin appeared to threaten the U.S. with China “erasing” Taiwan Strait’s median line, in a heated exchange with U.S. officials amid former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.
American columnist James Pinkerton tweeted a reader’s online comment on the Washington Post report.
The reader Paul Messina said, “I believe that now that the Chinese economy is falling apart, Xi has realized that this ‘Wolf Warrior’ tactic has actually exacerbated the fall of Chinese industry. Besides aggravating the West, particularly the United States with this nonsense, it has led to multiple Western corporations leaving China, permanently closing their doors and factories in search of friendlier nations to do business.
“Vietnam and other nations have greatly benefited. Thus this idiot actually decreased the CCP’s prestige in the world. I believe that this is why his new ‘career’ is librarian. Xi made a big mistake with his ‘Wolf Warrior’ attitude towards the world. I believe that he now realizes this fact.”
Liu Jianchao, the head of the International Liaison Department of the CCP Central Committee, who is relatively moderate in terms of rhetoric and image, is considered a possible candidate to succeed Wang Yi as the next foreign minister.
According to The New York Times, as China is already seeking to soften its image in the U.S. and Europe and improve relations with some of its neighbors, appointing Liu may mean China is abandoning its “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.