50 dagar senare: Qin Gang fortfarande försvunnen

Kinas sparkade utrikesminister Qin Gang är fortfarande spårlöst försvunnen. Spekulationerna är många efter att toppdiplomaten inte synts till sedan 25 juni, bland annat påstås han ha haft en hemlig affär med en kinesisk tv-journalist. Men poängen, enligt The Atlantics Michael Schuman, är att om inte ens världens främsta Kinakännare kan lista ut vad som hänt en av landets mest internationellt kända politiker, vad mer pågår bakom regimens stängda dörrar? Han menar att mysteriet Qin Gang är en tydlig varningssignal på allvarliga svagheter i det kinesiska politiska systemet som uppstått under Xis styre. If the world’s best China experts can’t figure out what happened to one of the country’s most internationally recognizable officials, then imagine what else remains hidden behind the regime’s closed doors. By Michael Schuman 9 August, 2023 The disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has generated a torrent of speculation about what might have happened to him. The mystery points to a larger, and disconcerting, truth: We understand very little about the inner workings of Chinese politics at a moment when we need to know more than ever. China’s Communist regime has always been opaque. But the more China’s global power rises, the more problematic the Communist Party’s secrecy becomes. The decisions made in Beijing influence the wealth and welfare of billions of people, the health of the planet, and war and peace itself. Yet policy makers and diplomats around the world are too often left guessing about how these decisions are made, who is making them, and why. The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has further narrowed the already small window into the cloistered halls of power. “Secrecy is the default position of the Communist Party anyway, but it has been put on steroids under Xi,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me. In the strained relationship between the United States and China, the dearth of reliable information about Beijing’s circumstances and decision making could lead to dangerous misunderstandings. “This is a real problem in U.S.-China relations,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in Chinese government, told me. “You start to lose your appreciation for what is actually taking place in China and why,” with the result that “it is always easy to ascribe the worst narrative” to China’s actions. The missing minister is a case in point. Qin Gang is a well-known figure in Washington, where he previously served as ambassador to the United States before being promoted to foreign minister in December. He has been widely seen as an up-and-coming politician and a Xi loyalist. He was awarded a seat on the powerful Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in October. In early July, Qin failed to appear at several important diplomatic meetings. China watchers took note as Beijing abruptly canceled a planned visit by the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, and as China’s foreign ministry later cited health issues as the reason Qin did not attend a summit with Southeast Asian nations. Later that month, Qin was suddenly removed as foreign minister and replaced by his predecessor, Wang Yi. Two days after the announcement, the foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was asked about that decision at a briefing, and she offered no explanation, instead protesting the “malicious hype of this matter.” The government appears to be confused about how to present Qin’s disappearance. After his dismissal, the foreign ministry began erasing Qin from its website, only to reverse course and restore the deleted references. Meanwhile, Qin’s whereabouts remain unknown. He has not been seen in public since June 25. Tsang attributes the obfuscation surrounding Qin to the Communist Party’s tendency to place its own perceived interests ahead of concern for the international community or even the nation. “What the Chinese foreign minister does or doesn’t do, or what happens to him, matters to the rest of the world,” Tsang said. “Does the Communist Party, in particular its core leader, give much of a monkey for this implication for the rest of the world? No.” China watchers have stepped in to fill the information void with debate and speculation about Qin’s apparent downfall. Conditioned by experience with official deception, many experts have suspected that something sinister is afoot. Perhaps Qin ran afoul of the party bosses and became the target of a purge, or was the subject of an investigation for unknown infractions. A narrative emerged that alleges Qin had an affair—and possibly a child—with a journalist at a Chinese-language television network. Though hardly moral paragons, China’s top leaders frown upon such personal foibles if they can potentially compromise the Communist Party. But the sex-scandal saga could just as easily be utter nonsense. Qin so far seems to have retained his other, more influential, posts, including on the party’s Central Committee, which implies that politics may not be at play. Or that Xi has not yet decided on Qin’s ultimate fate. Or that the party is trying to deflect criticism from Xi, who elevated Qin over more experienced officials, in the hope that the controversy blows over. Or … who knows. But therein lies the big point. If the world’s best China experts can’t figure out what happened to one of China’s most internationally recognizable officials, then imagine what else remains hidden behind the regime’s closed doors. The party prefers it that way. Michelle Mood, a longtime China expert at Kenyon College, commented to me that the Qin affair reveals “the limits of the knowable with regard to China.” Xi has consistently tightened the state’s grip on information within China. In recent years, censors have suppressed discussion of economic policy, LGBTQ issues, and even K-pop. Regulators recently finalized new rules for chatbots run by artificial intelligence that, though less stringent than an earlier draft, insist the content generated must be in line with the country’s socialist values. In May, authorities detained a comedian who told a joke about China’s military and fined the company he worked for $2 million—a sign of just how sensitive the state can be. Xi’s government has shown heightened paranoia about what the world knows about China as well. Earlier this year, a prominent database of Chinese academic research curtailed foreign access to its platform. Vincent Brussee and Kai von Carnap, analysts at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, argued in a recent paper that a newly amended anti-espionage law could target “almost anyone who exchanges information with international counterparts” and that the aim is “to make the Communist Party the sole narrator of China’s story.” The state security ministry, in its first post on a social-media account, encouraged Chinese citizens to get involved in antispying efforts by spying on others. Tsang argues that the trend toward greater secrecy is a consequence of Xi’s centralization of power. “Unlike in collective leadership, when the top leader can hide behind collective decisions, there is nowhere for Xi Jinping to hide,” Tsang told me. Exerting control over information through secrecy allows a strongman to protect his stature and to claim infallibility: “If nobody knows what actually happened, you were never wrong, because they can never find evidence to show that you were wrong,” Tsang said. But in truth Xi has often been wrong, and China is suffering for it. His policies have contributed to a sagging economy, hostile relations with most of the world’s major powers, and growing pessimism about the nation’s future. With a shortage of good news to boast of, Xi preserves his political standing by wielding ever greater influence over narratives about China. The effort to stave off criticism and bad news has led the leadership to treat topics of discussion that were once considered relatively safe ground—such as economic policy—as potentially threatening. To Minzner, the Council on Foreign Relations fellow, this rise in sensitivity toward formerly innocuous subject matter is evidence of a broader trend toward “securitization,” in which the system responds to economic and social pressures by locking down access to information. Put another way, according to Mood, the Communist Party’s “political legitimacy, no longer supported by a growing economy, is now based on censorship to control information and knowledge.” The thickening shroud of secrecy is a problem not only for policy makers around the world, but also for those governing China. Domestic officials responsible for addressing the consequences of the country’s slowing growth and social pressures are not talking to one another, says Mary Gallagher, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Michigan. “I don’t think the system is as responsive as it used to be, and I think that will be very problematic based on how many problems it needs to solve in the next five to 10 years,” Gallagher told me. In other words, Xi’s secrecy could imperil his ambitions for China and its role in the world. The Qin Gang mystery is thus a warning sign of profound and dangerous weaknesses in the Chinese political system that have emerged under Xi’s rule and are likely to continue to deepen. The Qin affair “points to this issue of elite instability that I think we’ll see more of in China,” Gallagher said. “We don’t know the process by which the next leader is going to be chosen, and we also don’t know when the next leader will be chosen. That just makes the people who are jockeying for that position and of course the people around them just more prone to internal struggles.” The world will likely have to guess at those machinations as well. “I really worry that we are moving into an era where people understand less and less what’s actually taking place in China,” Minzner told me. “I find it very difficult to figure out how this gets reversed.” © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.