China yesterday refused to disclose why Qin Gang (秦剛) had been sacked as foreign minister, insisting it was releasing information “normally,” despite him having not been seen publicly for more than a month.
Qin was removed from office by Beijing’s top lawmaking body on Tuesday after just 207 days in the job, following weeks of speculation that the former ambassador to the US and confidant of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had fallen out of favor.
Asked at a regular briefing about his removal, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning (毛寧) referred journalists to a state news agency article and declined to offer any further information.
Photo: AFP
“Xinhua has already published information. You can refer to that,” Mao said.
Asked how she evaluated Qin’s brief stint as foreign minister, Mao said that she was “probably not the right person to answer that question.”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to pass judgement,” she said, adding that China was “releasing normal information” concerning Qin’s position.
Pressed repeatedly by journalists to provide more details about Qin’s fate, Mao said that decisions made on Tuesday by China’s top lawmaking body and the president were “very clear.”
“I suggest you all refer to that. I don’t have any additional information,” she said.
“China’s diplomatic activities are all advancing steadily,” Mao added.
Any reference to 57-year-old Qin had been removed from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site as of yesterday.
A search for his name yielded no results and previous articles about his diplomatic appearances showed a message saying the page “does not exist or has been deleted.”
His name did appear on other Chinese government Web sites, including the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce and state media outlets.
Qin has been replaced as foreign minister by top diplomat Wang Yi (王毅).
The foreign ministry had dodged questions about Qin for weeks, after previously saying that “health reasons” were to blame for his absence.
“If he were a comrade in good standing who had fallen ill, I am not sure that would be happening,” China analyst Bill Bishop wrote in his Sinocism newsletter.
Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the US think tank Asia Society Policy Institute, agreed.
“Evidence is emerging suggesting this is indeed a political purge,” Thomas wrote on Twitter.
China remained tight-lipped for weeks about the fate of Qin, who has not been seen in public since June 25, when he met Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Rudenko in Beijing.
That did little to stem an explosion of rumors online, some of which claimed the diplomat’s alleged affair with a prominent television anchor had landed him in hot water.
“People from the outside are totally in the dark and the episode illustrates that Chinese politics is becoming increasingly unpredictable and volatile, though under a calm surface,” said Ho-fung Hung (孔誥烽), an expert in Chinese politics at Johns Hopkins University.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS