The foreign ministry rejects "malicious publicity" and asserts that Beijing would immediately provide details.
BEIJING, Photos and remarks of the 57-year-old foreign minister started to vanish from
his former ministry's website hours after China's top legislature called a
special meeting last week to remove him.
Regardless, Qin
does not appear on the website's index of "former ministers," and for
several more days, a quest for his name had been producing the message, "Sorry, Qin Gang is not
discovered," even though part of this information had resurfaced days
later.
It has been almost a month since he last appeared in public.
According to a spokeswoman for
the foreign ministry Mao Ning, Beijing will promptly reveal facts surrounding Qin, which also denies
"malicious
speculation."
She was
replying to a question from a reporter about the transparency surrounding Qin's
departure, one of more than 25 inquiries regarding Qin that the ministry dodged
during press briefings in recent days.
Rumor
Flounders
Requests for
comment on this article were not immediately answered by China's Foreign
Ministry or the State Council Information Office, which responds to media
inquiries on behalf of the party and government.
There will
likely be more rumors as a result of Qin's abnormally prolonged and
inexplicable absence, his quick termination from his position, and other
unusual events like the ministry's website.
According to
Ian Johnson, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations, "The reality will eventually come out - it usually does in
China, though it sometimes takes months or years." However, how he was fired makes it doubtful that it was for medical reasons.
Political analyst
Wu Qiang, who is based in Beijing, claimed he could "almost surely rule
out health as the real cause." If such were the case, Wu added, the state
could have substituted a deputy instead of formally dismissing him.
After being
selected as one of the country's youngest foreign ministers in December 2022, a
position with a five-year term, Qin performed in the role for just over six
months.
In China, subjects of officials dispersing and being erased from memory have occurred.
In China, such removals date back
many years.
Three
changes were made between 1955 and 1972 to a state-commissioned painting of the
iconic scene when Mao Zedong stepped atop Tiananmen Gate to proclaim the
establishment of the People's Republic to remove officials who later
came into conflict with Mao.
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