I believe that this series of nonappearances may be linked to another mystery: the dramatic fall from grace in July of Foreign Affairs Minister Qin Gang, who had enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom that must have been authorized and orchestrated by Mr. Xi.
Within a year of working on the protocol arrangements for Mr. Xi’s meetings with foreign leaders, Mr. Qin had been promoted to assistant foreign minister, vice foreign minister, foreign minister, and then state councilor (which ranks above minister). Promotion from vice minister to state councilor normally takes five years; Mr. Qin achieved it in three months. Expert observers and Chinese insiders speculated that Mr. Xi was testing Mr. Qin’s potential for further high office.
In 2010, Mr. Qin served a stint as second-in-command to the ambassador of the Chinese Embassy in the UK. After only 15 months in London, he was brought back to Beijing to become director-general of the Information Department, leading the ministry’s relations with the foreign media. He was later made director-general of the Protocol Department, a role no less important in the Chinese setting. This position brought him into direct contact with Mr. Xi, who was clearly impressed.
During his posting in London, the handsome, debonair Mr. Qin would certainly have met Fu Xiaotian, bureau chief of the Hong Kong-based network Phoenix Television. Ms. Fu was at the start of a brilliant television career. From London, she soon moved to Hong Kong to host its prestigious series “Talk With World Leaders,” interviewing luminaries, such as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Ms. Fu hadn’t been born into China’s political elite but had been awarded degrees by China’s two top universities and the University of Cambridge. That privileged education and her subsequent rapid rise at Phoenix showed that she had won the backing of very powerful people.
However, in 2021, the people who had promoted her at Phoenix were ejected by Mr. Xi. Liu Changle, who had controlled Phoenix since founding it in 1996, was forced out of the company, together with all his senior managers. This wasn’t a corporate reshuffle; it was a power move by Mr. Xi against his most deadly opponents in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the “Shanghai faction.” Mr. Liu was prominent in that faction, and Phoenix was a weapon that Mr. Xi wanted under his control.
At this moment, when her career was in jeopardy, Ms. Fu reached out to Mr. Qin. On March 21, 2022, she flew by private jet from California, where she was now living, to Washington to record an interview with him for “Talk with World Leaders.” At one point in the show, this glamorous couple was shown standing side by side, surveying the rooftop scene in Washington. Chinese netizens who viewed it commented that the chemistry and physical ease between them was unmistakable.
Eight months later, on Nov. 24, 2022, Ms. Fu gave birth to a boy. She named him Er-Kin, which some netizens pointed out could be a play on the Chinese for “Son of Qin.”
Four months later, when Mr. Qin, now foreign minister, was accompanying Mr. Xi to Moscow, Ms. Fu made two new postings on Chinese social media that fueled much more speculation (never confirmed) that she was claiming Mr. Qin to be the father of her son.
Three weeks later, on April 10, Ms. Fu posted on Twitter a photo of herself with Er-Kin on the same private jet that had carried her to Washington to interview Mr. Qin a year earlier. She wrote that it was taking her back to the “front line,” presumably China. She hasn’t been seen in public since. If Ms. Fu’s career strategy had been based on a partnership with Mr. Qin, it was in deep trouble, as a new development would soon confirm.
On June 25, Mr. Qin held talks with counterparts from Russia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, but then he, too, disappeared from public view. On July 11, the Foreign Ministry attributed this to “health reasons.” Still, netizens flooded social media with assertions that he was in a relationship with Ms. Fu and speculation on this and other possible reasons for his disappearance.
The internet censors would normally block gossip about an official of Mr. Qin’s seniority. Their failure to do so is evidence, I believe, that they were taking their orders not from Mr. Qin’s mentor, Mr. Xi, but from Mr. Xi’s opponents. Most worrying for Mr. Xi was a call by Wang Guangya, former vice minister of foreign affairs, for Mr. Qin to be officially investigated for misconduct involving Ms. Fu.
Mr. Wang isn’t just any former vice minister. His wife is the daughter of Marshal Chen Yi, one of the most illustrious of the founding fathers of communist China. Mr. Wang’s diplomatic postings had included that of China’s representative at the United Nations.
His wife’s family may have had strong reasons to inflict damage on Mr. Xi. Soon after Mr. Xi came to power, made clear his determination to block political reform, and centralized power in his own hands, Mr. Wang’s brother-in-law, Chen Xiaolu, warned against a reversion to the political methods used by Mao Zedong in the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his father, who had courageously opposed the Cultural Revolution and suffered for it.
Mr. Chen had been an early director of Anbang Insurance Group, the insurance company founded and run by a grandson-in-law of Deng Xiaoping, which amassed assets worth $300 billion before being liquidated, a decision that Mr. Xi must have approved. When Anbang Insurance Group came under attack, Mr. Chen was detained briefly, then released but kept under surveillance. A few months later, he died, supposedly of a heart attack, just three months before the founder of Anbang Insurance Group was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Mr. Wang’s call for Mr. Qin to be investigated suggests that Mr. Qin was caught in a crossfire between families and factions who were infinitely richer and more powerful than him.
So thorough is the surveillance and reporting of senior officials by China’s security services that Mr. Xi must have known the details of Mr. Qin’s private life, including the social media postings linking Mr. Qin and Ms. Fu and her links to the Shanghai faction, before promoting him so far and so fast. He must have calculated that he could protect his protégé from attack. True, Mr. Qin was married, but no Chinese minister had ever been dismissed for an extramarital relationship. True also, Ms. Fu had spent her whole career in an organization controlled by the Shanghai faction, but Mr. Xi had destroyed the corporate power of those responsible for her rise to stardom.
If such were Mr. Xi’s calculations, his adversaries would have proved him wrong. For the first time since assuming leadership of the Party in 2012, he has proved incapable of defending one of his protégés, and not just any protégé, but the one whom he had marked out for promotion to the highest level. Most foreign observers who are accustomed to regarding him as all-powerful are still puzzling over the reasons for Mr. Qin’s removal. Still, I believe that in the senior ranks of the CCP, Mr. Qin’s removal has diminished Mr. Xi’s authority. For now, Mr. Qin retains the title of state councilor but has been stripped of all power and is absent from public view. As things stand, he’s a nonperson.
Viewed as an isolated phenomenon, Mr. Qin’s removal is bad enough for Mr. Xi. But viewed in the context in which Mr. Xi has been absent from public view without good cause and then appears in odd places, such as China’s far west or northeast, without good cause, is worse. And we haven’t even touched on the turmoil in China’s military high command.
The total victory that most commentators declared Mr. Xi to have won at the CCP’s 20th National Congress in November 2022 wasn’t all that it seemed. He was able to pack the top leadership with his chosen followers, but in reality, it was only a phase in a continuing and deadly power struggle.
The apparently invincible Mr. Xi suffers from a fundamental weakness: He’s defending a totalitarian political system that has produced an array of deep and long-lasting problems that it can’t resolve. He didn’t create those problems, but for a decade, he ignored and intensified them, and he’s now frozen in impotence as they manifest themselves before the eyes of his people and the world. His enemies at home and abroad are watching with keen interest, and behind the scenes, they’re maneuvering against him. The removal of Mr. Qin is just the first fruit they’ve picked.
