Replaced, Then Erased: Mystery Deepens Around China’s Former Foreign Minister

livemint.com:

HONG KONG—China’s former foreign minister, who was replaced on Tuesday after he went missing from public view for more than a month, is now disappearing from parts of the Foreign Ministry’s website—an erasure that is intensifying intrigue around what happened to him. Authorities didn’t provide a reason for their decision to removeQin Gang from his post, which has now been filled—at least temporarily—by his predecessor Wang Yi. The Foreign Ministry previously cited unspecified health reasons for Qin’s absence.

Since replacing him with Wang, the ministry has scrubbed nearly all mentions of Qin as the foreign minister from its official website. Many references to Qin in his most recent role likewise disappeared from the ministry’s account on Weibo, a popular social-media platform. During the Mao era, the Communist Party was known to excise senior officials from photos and other official records, typically after they fell out of favor and were purged.

Such high-level erasures have been much rarer in the decades since and may never have been carried out so conspicuously. The changes attracted attention on Weibo and in other corners of the Chinese internet, fueling fevered speculation about Qin’s fate. “Had Qin Gang not ever been a foreign minister?" one Chinese lawyer wrote in a post on Weibo.

“The way the website handled this isn’t appropriate." The 57-year-old served less than seven months as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s handpicked foreign minister following an unusually rapid rise through the foreign-service ranks. Qin’s online erasure undermined the notion that he was replaced as a result of serious health issues, political analysts said. “Even if health issues had necessitated Qin’s removal as foreign minister, there is