China replaces sacked foreign minister with predecessor
China’s foreign minister Qin Gang has been removed from his post, following an abrupt disappearance that has lasted weeks. He will be replaced by his predecessor Wang Yi, state media reported.
The decision was made Tuesday in an emergency session held by the Chinese Communist Party’s top decision-making body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.
The lawmakers voted to have the 57-year-old foreign minister replaced effectively but did not provide an explanation for his removal —prompting further speculation about his mysterious months-long absence.
Qin’s perceived closeness with Chinese leader Xi Jinping heightens the intrigue of his disappearance. Qin enjoyed an unusually fast rise within China’s foreign service: first as the Foreign Ministry spokesman, then as Chief Protocol Officer, Vice Minister, and Chinese Ambassador to the U.S., before landing his most recent post.
A rumor attributing the minister’s disappearance to an extramarital affair with famous TV news anchor Fu Xiaotian has been reported by Taiwanese and Hong Kong media and has dominated Chinese social media in recent weeks. The BBC reported that searches for Qin’s name on Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, skyrocketed amid reports of his absence — up 5,000% in a week. Fu has also reportedly not been seen since a “flirtatious” TV interview between the pair surfaced online.
After the abrupt announcement on Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry website scrubbed most traces of Qin Gang — leaving just some mentions of the minister’s most recent meetings on the English-language version.
Wang Yi, who will be returning to his old role, had attended the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Indonesia earlier this month — an annual meeting where the region’s foreign ministers gather. This week, Wang was also in South Africa for a BRICS meeting.
Wang, 69, is a career diplomat and fluent Japanese speaker who served as China’s ambassador in Tokyo and head of China’s policy-making Taiwan Affairs Office.
Likened to a “silver fox” by China’s state media and online admirers due to his greying hair and diplomatic wiles, Wang currently heads the Chinese Communist Party Foreign Affairs Commission, the top foreign policy decision-making body.
Regarded by some of his foreign counterparts as suave and charming, he has become increasingly tough in recent years: a proponent of China’s aggressive and often abrasive “wolf warrior” style of diplomacy.
“No matter how blonde you dye your hair or how sharp you make your nose, you will never become European, American or Western,” he told South Korean and Japanese counterparts at a forum earlier this month, in a criticism about their pro-western stance.
He told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022 that the U.S. should “stop trying to deal with the Chinese from a position of strength.”
When he met Blinken in Beijing last month – the first visit by Washington’s top diplomat in five years – he told him China had “no room for compromise or concessions” on Taiwan, the democratic island China claims as its own and Washington supports.
Journalists have also been on the receiving end of Wang’s sharp tongue.
After a Canadian reporter asked him about human rights in 2016, he responded by saying the question was “full of prejudice against China and arrogance”. “I don’t know where that comes from. This is totally unacceptable,” he said through an interpreter.
Wang had been kept busy after stepping down as foreign minister in 2022.
He was seen as instrumental in brokering a surprise peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March and then stood in for his successor Qin Gang at several engagements after he disappeared from public view for a month before his removal.
