Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who disappeared in June 2023 with no clear explanation and has not been seen in public since, is reportedly working a “low-level job” in Beijing and has no future career prospects, the Washington Post reported this week.
Qin was one of the most extraordinary diplomats on genocidal dictator Xi Jinping’s roster, rising to become the youngest foreign minister in decades after a brief but memorable stint as the Chinese ambassador to the United States.
In that role, Qin earned a reputation as both a belligerent “wolf warrior”-style Chinese diplomat – weaponizing rudeness to berate American counterparts – and as a lover of American culture, seen attending NBA games and visiting U.S. colleges.
Then, suddenly, Qin Gang disappeared. His last public appearance was on June 25, 2023, and he has not been seen. Xi finally fired him from the foreign minister post in July and he lost several other Communist Party positions, but has not publicly faced criminal charges or accusations of corruption. He notably remains a “comrade” of the Party, despite disappearing during an era of purges that took down two defense ministers and several other high-ranking communists in a hail of corruption charges.
The most prevalent theory – in international media and on Chinese social media sites – is that Qin lost his job after having an extramarital affair. The woman implicated, former Phoenix TV journalist Fu Xiaotian, also disappeared from public life in early 2023. Her last social media posts before vanishing show her with an infant son, whose father’s identity remains unknown.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Qin “is alive but … in a position very diminished from his once-lofty perch.” The report, citing anonymous American officials, is the first such detailed report on Qin’s whereabouts currently.
According to the newspaper, Qin is working at “World Affairs Press,” a state-run publisher. The Post sent a journalist to the offices of the publisher, “in an alley in central Beijing,” where no one could confirm if Qin was, in fact, working for the company. None, however, reportedly denied it.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has not commented on the story as of Tuesday, nor has the Foreign Ministry offered any clarity on the head of the ministry disappearing since June. Shortly after Qin began cancelling professional engagements, the Foreign Ministry offered vaguely that he could not tend to his obligations for “physical reasons,” suggesting a potential coronavirus infection, but spokespersons never elaborated on the claim and stopped addressing concerns about Qin shortly thereafter.
The demotion appears to mean that, while Qin’s return to diplomacy seems impossible, he is not currently facing arrest, forced disappearance, or public humiliation. No government officials have publicly accused Qin of corruption or deviating from Communist Party orthodoxy, making his situation significantly different from several other high-ranking officials caught up in Xi’s purges. Shortly after becoming president in 2013, Xi announced a “mass line” campaign to eradicate corruption or disloyal officials, resulting in tens of thousands of cases of corruption filed in the ensuing decade.
Chinese state media claimed in January 2024 that the regime’s Central Commission of Discipline Inspection (CCDI) processed 470,000 anti-corruption cases in the first nine months of 2023 alone at all levels of government.
File/This photo illustration shows a search for the name of China’s former foreign minister Qin Gang on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website in Beijing on July 26, 2023. (PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
Qin’s case differs significantly from that of Li Shangfu, the former Chinese defense minister who also vanished in 2023. Li disappeared in August 2023 and has not been seen since. He was fired in October, leaving China without a defense minister through December. Nearly a year later, in June 2024, Chinese state media confirmed that Li – and his predecessor at the job, Wei Fenghe – were facing criminal investigations for having “seriously violated political and organizational discipline, and resisted organizational scrutiny.” Li is specifically facing charges of taking bribes while serving, as well as otherwise improperly using his office.
Qin has faced no such accusations, either in state media or on Chinese regime-controlled social media outlets such as Weibo. The Communist Party did little to censor rumors of Qin having an affair with Fu, the Phoenix TV journalist, which raised eyebrows given the speed and efficiency with which the Chinese government typically silences such rumors. That rumor began spreading more formidably through Taiwanese media outlets, which noted that Fu and Qin met for an interview in March 2022 prior to the abrupt appearance of Fu’s son on social media, and her equally abrupt silence. Phoenix TV erased the video interview Fu conducted with Qin from its Youtube account after Qin’s dismissal.
Other rumors spreading also suggested, adding a national security risk to the affair, that some Chinese officials believed Fu to be a foreign intelligence asset and that she had her child in the United States.
Qin’s disappearance after being seen as personally favored by Xi caused significant strife within Chinese diplomatic circles, international observers noted at the time. Former U.S. diplomat Daniel R. Russel described the situation as “embarrassing and unsettling to Chinese diplomats because of the uncertainty it injects in a system that is tightly controlled.”
“Secrecy is the chosen mode of operation because for the Chinese Communist Party, information is a weapon, but in this case, the mystery surrounding such an important official — foreign minister — is mind-boggling,” Jamestown Foundation senior fellow Willy Wo-Lap Lam commented in 2023.