China’s former foreign minister Qin Gang, who disappeared from view more than a year ago, has been demoted to a low-level publishing job, says the Washington Post, quoting two former US foreign officials.
The former officials, who did not want to be named, said Qin had been given a job at World Affairs Press, a state-owned publishing house affiliated with the foreign ministry.
Qin, 58, who was foreign minister from December 2022 till July 2023, has not been seen in public since June 25 last year.
The rise and fall of a ‘wolf warrior’
His fall was as swift as his rise.
As a Xi loyalist, he was not only made foreign minister at 56 but also elevated to state councillor, a senior position that his predecessor, Wang Yi, reached only in his 60s, after five years as foreign minister.
Qin impressed Xi by burnishing the leader’s image while serving as the foreign ministry head of protocol from 2014 to 2017. Qin’s wife, Lin Yan, became a friend of Xi’s wife and made mooncakes for her, a US official said.
Qin was promoted to vice minister of foreign affairs in 2018 and then appointed ambassador to the United States in 2021. He returned to Beijing to become foreign minister in December 2022.
He was one of the earliest “wolf warriors”, a new generation of Chinese diplomats known for their aggressive style of diplomacy.
There were tense moments when he was ambassador in Washington. After the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August 2022, when China fired missiles in the waters around Taiwan, US officials met Qin to ease tensions. However, he spoke ominously about China “erasing the median line,” an unofficial boundary down the middle of the strait separating China from Taiwan.
He was dismissed as foreign minister after only seven months on the job when his predecessor, Wang, 70, returned to the post.
‘Extramarital affair’
Qin’s ouster remains a mystery.
He is said to have had an extramarital affair with Chinese television journalist Fu Xiaotian and had a child with her born in the United States.
However, top officials in China lead closely guarded lives and “personal indiscretion is rarely seen as a serious offence in the male-dominated world of Chinese politics”, says the Washington Post.
But Fu’s high-profile lifestyle, including her social media posts about meeting world leaders and travelling on private jets with her infant son, made the affair a potential security risk, adds the Post. Moreoever, she was rumoured to be passing secrets to a foreign intelligence service, but these were never confirmed. She has also not been seen for more than a year.
In July this year, the ruling Communist Party dismissed several officials from the 205-member Central Committee, including the former defence minister, who had been investigated for corruption. But Qin was reported to have “resigned” from the committee and remained a “comrade” — a member of the Communist Party. That suggested a lighter punishment.
“He’s not going to jail, but his career is over,” said a former US official.
World Affairs Press is located in an alley in central Beijing. It has a small bookstore stocked with memoirs of Chinese diplomats and books by Xi. The bookshop employees, however, told the Post they had not heard of Qin working at the publishing house.