Replaced, Then Erased: Mystery Deepens Around China’s Former Foreign Minister

HONG KONG—China’s former foreign minister, who was replaced on Tuesday after he went missing from public view for more than a month, is now disappearing from parts of the Foreign Ministry’s website—an erasure that is intensifying intrigue around what happened to him. 

Authorities didn’t provide a reason for their decision to remove Qin Gang from his post, which has now been filled—at least temporarily—by his predecessor Wang Yi. The Foreign Ministry previously cited unspecified health reasons for Qin’s absence.

Since replacing him with Wang, the ministry has scrubbed nearly all mentions of Qin as the foreign minister from its official website. Many references to Qin in his most recent role likewise disappeared from the ministry’s account on Weibo, a popular social-media platform.  

The changes attracted attention on Weibo and in other corners of the Chinese internet, fueling fevered speculation about Qin’s fate.

“Had Qin Gang not ever been a foreign minister?” one Chinese lawyer wrote in a post on Weibo. “The way the website handled this isn’t appropriate.” 

The 57-year-old served less than seven months as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s handpicked foreign minister following an unusually rapid rise through the foreign-service ranks. Qin’s online erasure undermined the notion that he was replaced as a result of serious health issues, political analysts said. 

“Even if health issues had necessitated Qin’s removal as foreign minister, there is no reason this would lead to the deletion of the past record of his meetings within the MFA site,” wrote David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a U.S.-based research group.

Asked about the changes at a regular press briefing on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the website was being updated according to protocols. 

The drama surrounding Qin comes at a delicate time for both Beijing and Washington, as the two powers have only recently reestablished high-level communication at a time of soaring tensions. Political analysts say the 69-year-old Wang, the Communist Party’s top foreign-affairs specialist, was likely installed as an interim replacement to buy time for Xi and other senior officials to find a more permanent solution. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a visit to the Pacific island nation of Tonga, said he wished Qin well and promised to work with Wang, whom he has met on several occasions. 

“I’ve also known Wang Yi for more than a decade,” Blinken said. “I anticipate being able to work well with him, as we have in the past.”

Political analysts said Qin’s replacement was unlikely to derail diplomacy between the U.S. and China in the long run because Xi sets foreign policy, though it serves to highlight the increasing opacity of China’s political system. 

Searches on the Foreign Ministry website for Qin’s name in Chinese or English returned no results on Wednesday. Qin continued to be listed as foreign minister in one statement on the site, which described him as representing China in the establishment of diplomatic ties in Honduras in March. Unlike the hundreds of other statements that have been removed, his name didn’t appear in the headline on the Honduras item. 

Searches for Qin’s name through the ministry’s official accounts on the popular app WeChat still produced results from his time as foreign minister. News items describing Qin in his previous roles as vice minister and ambassador to the U.S. remain on the ministry’s website.  

State media accounts of Qin’s removal haven’t mentioned any change to his role as a state councilor, a senior government ranking in China’s cabinet. As of Wednesday afternoon, the cabinet’s website had been updated to remove mention of his ministerial role but continued to list his other titles, including as a member of the Communist Party’s elite Central Committee. 

China’s internet censors have taken a selective approach to Qin. On Wednesday, Weibo was hiding search results under some hashtags related to his removal, as well as under a hashtag for “The Search for Qin,” a fantasy TV series set in China’s ancient Qin dynasty.  

But users otherwise were given space to continue indulging in speculation about the reasons for his disappearance, including the possibility of an extramarital affair. 

“This is certainly not a normal job transfer,” wrote one Weibo user, nodding to the seeming ubiquity of the affair rumor on Chinese social media.  The post received more than 10,000 likes.

Write to Wenxin Fan at [email protected]