It’s not every day that a Chinese foreign minister is sacked, especially one who has been a shining example of a “wolf warrior”. The former minister was reportedly close to President Xi Jinping and allegedly had an affair with a journalist who is suspected of being a double agent.
On Tuesday evening, Qin Gang fit the bill. He has been out of the public eye for a few weeks now, with the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson either refusing to answer questions about his absence from work or simply saying that ill health prevented him from attending meetings such as the ASEAN meetings earlier this month in Indonesia.
According to the online news portal Asia Sentinel, rumours of an affair between Qin and a TV reporter from Phoenix Television, a Chinese state-owned broadcasting network based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen have been swirling around for some time, and the Chinese government hasn’t denied them.
The woman’s name is said to be Fu Xiaotian. Her suspected status as a double agent for British intelligence is also interesting.
On 17 July, when a reporter asked the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning if Qin Gang was being investigated for his alleged affair, the spokeswoman replied that she did not understand the situation.
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The rise and fall
Clearly, ten days is a long time in Chinese politics. On Tuesday evening, the news that Qin Gang had been removed as foreign minister flew thick and fast around the globe. Stories of Qin’s rise and rise in China’s complex and opaque politics have since dominated the news.
Before he was appointed foreign minister, Qin was briefly the Chinese ambassador to the US, where he continued with China’s recently minted “wolf warrior” diplomacy that became a central motif of Xi Jinping’s rule during the Covid years — when China was accused of being responsible for the pandemic.
In March, describing the fractious US-China relationship, Qin told the media that it was a zero-sum game in which “you die and I live.”
With Qin gone, the first manifestation of a shake-up in Chinese politics is already visible. Qin’s immediate boss, state councillor Wang Yi, has been named the new Chinese foreign minister. He attended the ASEAN meeting as well as the East Asia summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum earlier this month — where Wang met external affairs minister S Jaishankar — and participated in the national security advisers meeting of the BRICS countries in South Africa on Monday.
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is an acronym that became a reality a couple of decades ago when an economist at Goldman Sachs thought these were the new emerging economies of the future.
Of course, Goldman Sachs got it wrong by a few decades, because China has since emerged as the world’s second-largest economic power and seems ready to fund the rest of the group’s growth and economic progress single-handedly.
The South Africa BRICS conclave, where Wang Yi met India’s NSA Ajit Doval on the sidelines, was a preparatory gathering before the five heads of state and government come together in late August.
Prime Minister Modi is expected to travel to South Africa to participate as is Xi Jinping. Only Russia’s Vladimir Putin is unlikely to attend, presumably because he is fighting a war in Ukraine.
Notably, after the Doval-Wang meeting, both countries issued somewhat different statements about their meeting, said to be largely dominated by the three-year-long India-China standoff in eastern Ladakh.
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Modi and Xi’s dance
If Modi and Xi do show up in South Africa, they will have to say more than a few words to each other. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Samarkand last year, it was possible to get away with a few polite words because it was a much larger group that attended.
At Delhi’s own SCO summit in early July, Modi and Xi confronted each other across a video screen, hardly the best place for showcasing either icy coldness or significant disapproval; the dismissive shrug of the shoulders and a pointed ignoring of the other’s presence doesn’t really work well on camera.
For Modi, who likes to display friendship, affection and camaraderie through the proverbial hug and backslap with fellow heads of state and government worldwide, a possible meeting with Xi Jinping in South Africa will be watched carefully for any change in body language. Just like a good photo that speaks a thousand words, a photo opportunity among the BRICS leaders, each of them gladiators of their own universes, may reveal quite a lot.
Certainly, Doval was dispatched to speak to Wang Yi and try to find a solution to the Ladakh morass, where 50,000 soldiers each of the Indian and Chinese armies have been eye-to-eye on the Line of Actual Control since 2020.
Come September, Xi has also been invited to Delhi to participate in the G-20 summit. Question is, will he show up if no understanding between India and China has been reached after 18 rounds of talks between political commissars and military apparatchiks from both sides?
More to the point, will he be welcome?
A reading of the Doval-Wang meeting in South Africa is quite instructive, especially when both see it differently. According to Doval, the situation on the LAC has “eroded strategic trust” and impacted the “public and political basis” of the bilateral relationship. But according to Wang Yi, both countries should “enhance strategic mutual trust and focus on consensus and cooperation” in the promotion of the relationship and its return to a stable and developmental path.
Was Wang trying to patronise Doval, subtly telling him that as the much stronger power, China will insist on the buffer zones being created on the Indian side? Certainly, India is not comfortable with that proposal, which is why the tension remains.
India, of course, knows Wang Yi well. In 1998, when India went nuclear under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, Wang Yi headed the India desk in the Chinese foreign ministry and went out of his way to be rude – and yes, patronising – about a much poorer fellow Asian power trying to gate-crash into the world’s exclusive nuclear club.
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The next man
As for Qin Gang and Fu Xiaotian, Asia Sentinel has some interesting information to share — clearly, Fu’s reputation as an international broadcaster has been recognised worldwide.
In 2017, the Italian ambassador to China awarded her the Order of the Star of Italy for her work. Then in 2019, a garden at Churchill College in Cambridge University was named after Fu and the ceremony was even attended by the Chinese charge d’affaires to the UK Chen Wen.
“Xiaotian has built a successful media career in China encouraging international cooperation and engagement as host of the Phoenix Television program Talk With World Leaders – featuring interviews with world political leaders, which has an audience of over 200 million people,” the college said.
“China pulled the strings at Churchill College,” a professor told Asia Sentinel.
With Qin Gang gone, Wang Yi will be the man the world — including India’s Jaishankar and Doval — will have to deal with. Certainly, diplomats wouldn’t be wrong to expand the Scarlett O’Hara quote in Gone With the Wind “tomorrow’s another day” to “tomorrow’s another day and it’s bound to be an interesting one”.
Jyoti Malhotra is a senior consulting editor at ThePrint. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)