Chinese whispers
Power shifts in China were always high on intrigue, but its foreign ministry has developed what looks distinctly like cloak-and-dagger characteristics. The country’s December-appointed foreign minister Qin Gang first vanished from public view.
He was last seen publicly in Beijing on 25 June at a meeting with visiting diplomats. His absence at a diplomatic summit in Indonesia was conspicuous, with vague health reasons cited for it by officialdom.
On Tuesday, the mystery of China’s missing minister deepened when Beijing announced that Qin Gang had been replaced by Wang Yi, his predecessor. While this news is expected to satisfy the Chinese people in whose name the republic is run, it will go down in the annals of history as yet another instance of opacity in governance under the country’s single-party rule.
Observers have been flagging a renewed concentration of authority at the top, with President Xi Jinping’s tightened grip taken as a sign of rising authoritarianism. As several examples show, non-democracies are prone to this phenomenon.
But then, as seen in the Soviet Union, the risk of things going badly wrong rises too. The bad calls of “strongmen" rarely get called out.
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