Last year, China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, suddenly disappeared. Qin was a rising star in Chinese politics and a protegé of China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping. In the first episode of our three-part investigation, we chart Qin’s rise and begin to untangle the mystery of his disappearance.
source：The Journal Podcast
10/18/2024 3:55:00 PM
Kate Linebaugh: The last day that Qin Gang, China's then Foreign Minister was seen in public, was on June 25th of last year. It was a hot humid day in Beijing and according to his official schedule, Qin spent some of that day carrying out his foreign minister duties as usual. Mostly this meant meeting other foreign ministers
Lingling Wei: We know from Qin Gang's official schedule that he met with Sri Lanka's foreign minister.
Kate Linebaugh: That's Chief China Correspondent Lingling Wei. Chin, and the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister discussed China's Belt and Road Initiative. They shook hands and snapped a picture in front of their country's flags.
Lingling Wei: We know he met with the Vietnamese Foreign Minister and that they talked about the Vietnamese Prime Minister's visit to China.
Kate Linebaugh: Another handshake, another picture in front of another set of flags.
Lingling Wei: And Qin Gang also met with a representative from Russia, one of China's key partners. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Andrey Rudenko, was in town that day.
Kate Linebaugh: A photo from the day shows Qin and Rudenko striding out of a building mid-conversation. Qin is tall with rimless glasses. He looks relaxed and confident. And he had reason to be. Qin was Foreign Minister, the country's top diplomat. He was a member of the upper echelon of the political elite. And he had the backing of China's powerful leader, Xi Jinping. Qin had risen high and was expected to keep rising. But instead, after that day in June, Qin disappeared.
Lingling Wei: All of a sudden, people realized they hadn't seen Qin Gang on TV, on state media reports, anywhere. He just vanished all of a sudden from public view. He even skipped some meetings, very important international meetings. So that basically triggered a lot of speculation, especially on social media about his whereabouts, what had happened to him?
Kate Linebaugh: Online people were asking, where is Qin Gang? Foreign journalists in Beijing began pressing China's foreign ministry for answers.
Rick Waters: Does the foreign ministry have any updates on Qin Gang and when he will return to duties?
Danny Russell: Is he the subject of a corruption probe?
Kate Linebaugh: The foreign ministry didn't provide any clear explanation. And now over a year after Qin Gang vanished, he still hasn't been seen in public. We asked the foreign ministry about Qin's, whereabouts and the circumstances of his disappearance. And they had no comment. When Qin Gang disappeared, do you remember what your reaction was?
Lingling Wei: I was really shocked. This is a guy who was so trusted by Xi Jinping so close to him. What could he have done wrong? That was my biggest question. What heck did he do?
Kate Linebaugh: Such a swift fall of a protégé of Xi Jinping? Lingling says it stood out as unusual. She couldn't explain it, so she started digging. Over the last year, she's spoken to dozens of people.
Lingling Wei: Hey guys, I'm about to go into a meeting...
Kate Linebaugh: And she's been reporting back to us along the way.
Lingling Wei: I do think we're really on the right track here. And obviously the story is extremely sensitive and we want to exercise extreme caution to make sure we... I've been a reporter for the Journal for 16 years. This really has been the hardest nut to crack so far.
Kate Linebaugh: This story is about Qin Gang, a Chinese political star whose rise was abruptly cut short. But it's also a story about the man who elevated him in the first place, the man who has ruled China with an iron fist for over a decade, Xi Jinping. And what we've discovered gives us a peek behind the veil of one of the most opaque and powerful governments in the world. From the journal, I'm Kate Linebaugh, and this is The Missing Minister, a three-part investigation into the mysterious disappearance of China's Foreign Minister. Episode one, The Vanishing of Qin Gang. When Qin Gang vanished, he was at the peak of his power. At 57, he was one of China's youngest ever foreign ministers. But we talked to someone who knew him when he was still at the very bottom of the political ladder.
Sarah Lubman: What I remember about Qin Gang was, first of all, I remember him as tall, but I'm pretty short, so that's relative.
Kate Linebaugh: Sarah Lubman was a reporter in China back in the late '80s and early '90s. She worked at an American news agency called UPI, covering, among other things, the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. It was at UPI that Sarah got to know the future Foreign Minister. Qin was in his 20s then, a low-level government worker assigned to UPI. His job was to help journalists like Sarah navigate China, to translate, book trips, and monitor Chinese news.
Sarah Lubman: I do remember him as a very lanky guy. I also remember him as arrogant, so he had, not a chip on his shoulder, but there was just something about his manner that suggested that this job was beneath him, which it may have been because his English was really good. He was clearly very smart. He was clearly very ambitious.
Kate Linebaugh: Sarah and Qin worked together in a converted apartment in one of Beijing's diplomatic compounds.
Sarah Lubman: It was a long railroad apartment, with two rooms next to each other. And Qin Gang would sit in one room and the correspondents were in the other room where all the computer monitors were. And when we wanted to watch the news, we would go into that next room.
Kate Linebaugh: But Sarah says translators like Qin weren't just there to be helpful. They were also there to keep an eye on UPI's journalists.
Sarah Lubman: We just assumed that they were reporting back on what we were doing.
Kate Linebaugh: Really?
Sarah Lubman: Yeah, I mean that was just assumed. Then look, they were government assigned. And I'm sure that they were there to support us, but also to keep tabs on us, I have no doubt. The one concrete memory I have of working with him is of watching a newscast with him and a phrase came up that I didn't know. And so I turned to him to say, "Hey, can you tell me what they just said?" And he was tipped back in his chair. He was not leaning forward, intently listening to the news. He was tipped back in his chair like, "Yeah, I can't believe I need to do this." But when I turned to him and said, "Hey, what did they say?" He snapped to attention. He tipped his chair back forward and told me immediately what they'd said. So clearly even, when he was just half listening, he got the sense this was a job he could do in his sleep.
Kate Linebaugh: Sarah realized, even then, that Qin was operating below his potential, that given the chance, he could go far. She just didn't realize how far.
Sarah Lubman: When he became Foreign Minister, a friend of mine who'd been a reporter in China called me and said, "Do you remember Qin Gang from the UPI Bureau?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "That's the Foreign Minister." And I was just flabbergasted that that same gangly, cocky kid was now Foreign Minister.
Kate Linebaugh: There's an expectation about how you rise through the Chinese political ranks, and it's not generally a fast process. You're supposed to put in your time and move up rung by rung. That's how most of Qin's career at the foreign ministry went. He did various stints at the Chinese embassy in London, and he worked as a foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing where he responded to reporters questions with scripted talking points. But then something happened that would put Qin on the fast track. He got a new job and a new boss, one who did things differently. In 2012, Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party, and the following year, President of China.
Lingling Wei: Xi Jinping is the most powerful, the most forceful Chinese leader in recent decades. Ever since he came to power in late 2012, Xi Jinping basically has embarked on this never-ending effort to centralize power into his own hands. Xi Jinping basically made himself the chairman of everything in China.
Kate Linebaugh: Soon after Xi came to power, Qin landed a job that would put him in close proximity to Xi. In 2014, Qin became Xi's Chief of Protocol at the Foreign Ministry.
Danny Russell: Protocol shouldn't be confused with which fork to use at dinner and whether the fish knife goes on the left or the right of the butter knife. It's organizing the movements of the leaders and the moving parts of a visit.
Kate Linebaugh: That's Danny Russell. He was a diplomat at the State Department during the Obama administration. And he worked with Qin a few times when Qin was chief of protocol. Like in 2015 when Qin accompanied Xi on his first official visit to the US. Do you remember any stories from Qin Gang at that time?
Danny Russell: I do have a recollection of Qin Gang and the Chinese team being really passionate and angst-ridden over the possibility that there could be a protest that would impinge on the eyeballs of Xi Jinping, of the leader. I think there was almost a sense of terror that if something as embarrassing and politically shameful as that were to occur, that they were going down with the ship.
Kate Linebaugh: Wow. Another person familiar with the rough-and-tumble of official visits is former US diplomat, Rick Waters.
Rick Waters: These visits are traumatic for those of us who have to organize them. The US team rolls in heavy with a few dozen planes and you're carefully choreographed. Effort immediately falls apart at first contact with reality.
Kate Linebaugh: Rick was working at the State Department when tensions with China were ratcheting up during the Trump administration. He helped organize President Trump's visit to Beijing in 2017. And there was one moment during that visit that stuck with him. It happened when Chinese security stopped a US military aid from entering a meeting room.
Rick Waters: We were in the Great Hall of the People for the meeting with Xi Jinping, and the security details got into a giant fistfight right outside the meeting room.
Kate Linebaugh: What?
Rick Waters: Yeah. At the time, there was a mid-level foreign ministry official named Qin Gang, and he and I were the only ones in the room. And we were trying to pull these people off of each other as they were in a full-blown brawl, 10 feet outside the meeting room where Xi and Trump were together.
Kate Linebaugh: And on that visit, did you notice anything about how Qin handled that moment and the tensions between Trump and Xi at the time?
Rick Waters: Well, he didn't manage the policy. He was often not in the innermost room when they were talking about policy either. But what I saw is that the parts of the system that organized visits, they had a certain deference to him. And I think it's because they knew that he was an up-and-comer in the system and someone to whom they needed to be responsive because he was clearly empowered by Xi's office to manage what was a very important event for them at the time.
Kate Linebaugh: Qin wasn't in the room where the big policy decisions were being made, not yet. But as Chief of Protocol, he earned Xi's trust. And with Xi's backing, he would be catapulted to the highest echelons of China's political system and on to the global stage. That's next. In 2021, Qin Gang arrived in Washington, DC to start a new job.
Qin Gang: It's a great honor for me to be Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the United States of America.
Kate Linebaugh: Standing between Chinese and American flags, Qin made his first remarks as China's new man in DC.
Qin Gang: I firmly believe that the door of China-U.S relations, which is already open, cannot and should not be closed. This is the trend of the world, the call of the times, and the view of the people.
Kate Linebaugh: For Qin, it was an important promotion. Just three years earlier, he'd been Chief of Protocol at the Foreign Ministry. Now he was Beijing's voice in Washington.
Lingling Wei: That appointment in 2021 was quite a surprise decision.
Kate Linebaugh: That's our colleague Lingling again.
Lingling Wei: Qin Gang didn't have much of a US experience and the thinking was, based on officials familiar with the matter, the reason why Xi Jinping picked him for such an important job was mostly because Xi Jinping really trusted him. He believed that Qin Gang would be able to present China's story well in Washington.
Kate Linebaugh: But to present that story, Qin Gang had to build relationships in DC, and that was tough going.
Danny Russell: He was very unpopular among the policy people and even quite a few of the business leaders.
Kate Linebaugh: Here's Danny, one of the former diplomats we heard from earlier.
Danny Russell: I think they found him arrogant, even impolite, and at other times, highly formulaic. I don't know how he was dealing with his in-government counterparts, in part because they refused to meet with him for the better part of a year while he was in Washington. That's another story.
Kate Linebaugh: What? Why did they refuse to meet with him?
Danny Russell: I may be putting it a little bit strongly, but he arrived during a very chilly moment in US-China relations.
Kate Linebaugh: At that time, President Biden had recently come into the White House. But the change in administration didn't change much about the US-China relationship. The two countries were still at odds over a long list of issues, Taiwan, trade, espionage, and the disputes were getting personal.
Danny Russell: The new US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, was getting beastly treatment by the Chinese who just shut him out mercilessly. I think in some circles there was certainly a view that said, "You know what? Let's give them a taste of their own medicine."
Kate Linebaugh: A little quid pro quo.
Danny Russell: Try a little quid pro quo. Here's some reciprocity for you, buddy.
Kate Linebaugh: A State Department spokesperson said Ambassador Burns has had good access to Chinese officials during his tenure. But that there have been times when Chinese officials have refused to meet with him. Qin was trying to find his footing in the DC scene. But even amongst his colleagues, Qin wasn't always popular.
Lingling Wei: He was known as a very strict manager, very hands-on manager. He would publicly scold an underling for very little mistakes. So that kind of style earned him some resentment from others within the foreign ministry. And it was also well known that he has had some women issues.
Kate Linebaugh: Qin was married and he had a son. But according to Lingling's sources, Qin also had affairs.
Lingling Wei: That's what we have heard from officials back in China. But, at least back then, as long as you had the top leader's trust, all those issues were negligible. It didn't matter. You had women issues or other issues, as long as you had the top leader's trust, you're fine.
Kate Linebaugh: Qin did have Xi's trust. So much so that at the end of 2022, less than two years into Qin's ambassadorship, Xi handed him another promotion, Foreign Minister, one of China's most important political posts.
Lingling Wei: And this is a fun part. Most of the time when he was in DC, he couldn't even get meetings with Biden officials. So after the promotion, people were calling him and trying to meet with him.
Kate Linebaugh: His lonely Washington life was suddenly transformed with people returning his phone calls.
Lingling Wei: Exactly, exactly.
Danny Russell: That appointment was truly mind-boggling to me. I was stunned, and I think many of my friends and counterparts in the Chinese foreign ministry were similarly surprised. This was a case where Xi Jinping just reached into the system and plucked a loyal aid, some might say a toady, not out of obscurity, but certainly disrupted the natural order, the protocol order in terms of age and service, seniority.
Kate Linebaugh: In fact, Lingling's reporting shows Qin wasn't the foreign ministry's first pick for the job. He wasn't even their second or third pick.
Lingling Wei: Based on reporting, the foreign policy establishment in China recommended three names to the top leader, Xi Jinping, who should be the next foreign minister. Qin Gang wasn't one of them. So in the end, it was really Xi Jinping himself who decided to name him the foreign minister. So Xi gave him the job.
Kate Linebaugh: Then a few months later, Xi tacked on yet another fancy title. He made Qin not just Foreign Minister, but State Counselor, basically elevating Qin to a senior position in his cabinet. Qin's predecessor had waited five years before getting that promotion.
Danny Russell: That was really extraordinary.
Kate Linebaugh: What did that promotion say to you?
Danny Russell: What it told me is that China has now entered an imperial era in which the leader, call him General Secretary, call him President, call him Emperor, doesn't really matter. The singular leader now makes all of these personnel decisions, makes all decisions. So I think I took it much less as a story about Qin Gang and much more as a revelation about Xi Jinping.
Kate Linebaugh: So then it's July of last year, Qin's been Foreign Minister for about half a year, and people start to notice that he's gone missing. What happens from there?
Lingling Wei: Initially, the foreign ministry was very silent on questions about his whereabouts. Then one day in July, the spokesperson at the foreign ministry basically said he was absent for, quote unquote, health reasons.
Kate Linebaugh: What did you think of that?
Lingling Wei: In Chinese system, health reasons are often cited for officials who have basically fallen out favor or gotten into some kind of trouble. So the health reason explanations to me did sound like a cover for something else, something more problematic.
Kate Linebaugh: And then in September of last year, Lingling got a scoop. She reported that the Chinese government had conducted an investigation into Qin and senior Chinese officials were briefed on it.
Lingling Wei: Those high ranking officials were told that Qin's removal from the Foreign Minister job was due to, quote, lifestyle issues, which basically is a common party euphemism for sexual misconduct. They were specifically told that he had a affair while serving as a Chinese ambassador to the United States.
Kate Linebaugh: And did that explanation make sense to you?
Lingling Wei: It didn't make a lot of sense to me because high ranking officials in China, they have affairs all the time. It's never the reason why someone would get into serious trouble like this. There must have been something else.
Kate Linebaugh: Something else. When Lingling published her story about Qin's investigation last year, she didn't know what that something else was.
Lingling Wei: It was such a difficult story to report out, given the fact that China doesn't have any kind of transparency or accountability to speak of.
Kate Linebaugh: Chinese politics are steeped in secrecy. Even people within the Chinese government might only know parts of Qin's story, the parts the leadership wanted them to know. But Lingling kept digging. And she did have one thread to pull on. According to our sources, senior Chinese officials were told that Qin had been investigated because of an affair, but not just any affair. They were told that this affair could have compromised China's national security.
Lingling Wei: My ears perked up. It was very intriguing. What could have affair possibly compromised China's national security? Turns out it all had to do with this one woman, the woman he had affair with. Her name is Fu Xiaotian.
