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Hours after China’s top legislature convened a special meeting last week to remove foreign minister Qin Gang, photos and mentions of the 57-year-old started disappearing from his former ministry’s website.
While some of this information reappeared days later, Qin does not feature on the website’s list of “former ministers,” and for several more days a search for his name had been turning up: “Sorry, Qin Gang is not found.”
In fact, he has not been seen in public for more than a month.
The foreign ministry’s brief explanation weeks ago that this was due to health reasons, a remark later excised from official transcripts, has failed to stem a swirl of speculation not just about his fate but on how the whole saga reflects on the man that supported his meteoric rise, President Xi Jinping.
China named veteran diplomat Wang Yi to replace Qin, but gave few further clues on the reason for the change.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on Thursday said Beijing will release information in a timely matter regarding Qin and opposes “malicious hype.”
She was responding to a reporter who asked about transparency around Qin’s removal, one of more than 25 questions mentioning Qin at press briefings in recent days that the ministry has ducked.
SPECULATION SWIRLS
China’s foreign ministry and the State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the party and government, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
Qin’s unusually long and unexplained absence, his abruptly cut-short tenure, as well as other strange happenings like the ministry’s website, mean speculation will continue to swirl.
“The truth will eventually come out—it usually does in China, although it sometimes takes months or years—but the way he was dismissed makes it unlikely that it was for health reasons,” said Ian Johnson, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
