The curious case of the vanishing Chinese foreign minister

The mysterious disappearance of China’s smooth-talking foreign minister is like something from a Netflix script.

The minister, Qin Gang, vanished in June and was later officially “removed” from office to be replaced by an older and dourer model, Wang Yi – a reliable veteran of the acerbic soundbite.

That is all China is saying. The foreign ministry spokespeople nervously muttered about “health reasons”, which in authoritarian regimes can mean a bout of shingles or a bullet in the back of the neck. We do not know more.

In the absence of facts, there is rumour and speculation. If this was a Chinese version of The Crown they would set the plot at the court of Xi Jinping (who is more than a monarch, being head of state, boss of the ruling party and chief of the armed forces).

Qin Gang was an apparently healthy 57-year-old when he was last seen. He rose through the foreign ministry, but he was never a diplomat as the Vienna Convention has it. He came from an incubator of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the “University of International Relations”, which does not waste time on the disinterested academic study of world affairs.

To quote a retired MI6 expert on the country, China is a secret service with a state attached to it, not the other way round. So the young Qin was placed in the Beijing bureau of United Press International, an American news agency, as a translator. His wife, Lin Yan, was also put to work for the western media, where her charm won hearts and minds.

Since the script will major on treachery, it needs a smart take on these people. All foreign correspondents in China know that their local staff report on them. But one can tell who is a spy and who is just a gauche intern. The more intelligent, likeable, sympathetic and open-minded they are, the more certain it is that they work for the MSS.

Next we see the power couple. Qin and Lin, won favour after stints in London, where he impressed China’s new supreme leader. Fast forward to 2021 and Qin was sent to the United States as ambassador over the heads of rivals. Cue rustling inside the nest of vipers at the foreign ministry in Beijing. But nobody, of course, dared argue with the Leader.

It was in Washington we first saw Qin’s path cross the meteoric trail of Fu Xiaotian - with whom Qin was later rumoured to have had an affair. She was the go-getting interviewer for Phoenix Television, a Mandarin-language broadcaster with offices in Hong Kong. Fu, 40, impressed her subjects, who range from Henry Kissinger to Bashar al-Assad, and her show’s audience was said to top 200 million.

Luckily, the excruciating text of her interview with Ambassador Qin remains online. Caring, thoughtful and troubled, the envoy shared his wisdom and compliments her on spotting the difference between “impartial” and “neutral” when it came to Ukraine. He confided that he walks by the lakeside and ponders why America is so often at war. Their two minds were clearly at one.

Back at the MSS (which is no stranger to Phoenix Television) they must have been rubbing their hands at a classy “soft power” operation. It was the sort of performance that paved the way for Qin’s sudden ascent to the job of foreign minister last year.

But Fu is an act of her own. In May of 2019 she was pictured at Churchill College, Cambridge, with the master, Dame Athene Donald, and the Chinese chargé d’affaires to open a garden named after Fu in recognition of her generosity to her alma mater (she did a one-year M Phil in Education).

The last we saw of her was in a tweet on 11 April this year, from a private jet in Los Angeles. She was clutching a small baby son. Both “happily and sadly” it was to do her last big interview in Washington, she wrote. And then she, too, vanished.

The facts end there, but the multiple plotlines don’t. We must now wait to see what happens to Qin and when and if he will reappear. The same goes for Fu.

The truth is that Qin is the latest of a growing list of people disappeared under Xi’s rule. The Chinese leader believes the Communist party is given new strength by periodic bouts of punishment. Others are left to feel insecure – even more so when the apparent victim is as high profile as Qin.

Perhaps it is all an unfortunate misunderstanding and he will return to the safety of the party machine. But as time goes by, that seems increasingly unlikely to be the twist at the end of this story.