China shows its structural weakness with response to disappearing ministers
Tom Rogan
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Imagine if Secretary of State Antony Blinken suddenly disappeared. The State Department first said he was ill. Then Biden replaced Blinken without comment. As the days and weeks passed, the Biden administration simply refused to comment. Months later, we have no more information as to where Blinken is and what led him to disappear. Now imagine that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin suddenly disappeared. Imagine that officials are only saying that they know nothing about what’s happened, even though the nature of his position means that some must know something.
That’s exactly akin to what has happened in China over the past few months.
First, Foreign Minister Qin Gang disappeared without a trace in July. He hasn’t been seen since. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has offered no details on his whereabouts or reason for them. It says only that Wang has been replaced by his hawkish predecessor, Wang Yi. Now Defense Minister Li Shangfu has disappeared. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials believe Li has been removed from office. Whatever the cause, Li’s departure is deeply embarrassing for Xi Jinping. The all-powerful president only ascended Li to the powerful Central Military Commission last October.
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Asked about Li’s disappearance on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said she didn’t know anything about it. But while it may technically be true that Mao doesn’t know where Li has gone, when Chinese officials stick with the refrain, “I know nothing,” they only underline the authoritarian secrecy that so defines their government. This is a problem for Beijing as it claims to offer only trustworthy “win-win cooperation” with the world. U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel has rightly drawn attention to Beijing’s lack of transparency, observing that line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
The deeper problem for Beijing is that its secrecy on these disappearances is only the tip of the iceberg. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons often resort to snarky short rebukes when asked legitimate but uncomfortable questions. This can often become absurd. On Friday, for example, AFP asked about Chinese espionage in the U.K., to which the reply was: “We’ve already made clear China’s position on this issue earlier. The allegation that China spies on the U.K. is entirely groundless. We have no interest in and will not interfere in the U.K.’s internal affairs.”
Considering that Chinese espionage targeting the U.K. ranges widely across domains of intellectual property theft, political subversion, agent recruitment, cyber activity, and beyond, Mao’s “entirely groundless” assertion is prima facie absurd. Everyone with a brain knows it. But the Foreign Ministry’s impulse toward evasiveness and hostility underlines the Chinese Communist Party’s reflexive inability to accept perceived vulnerability. Officials fear that to do otherwise might undermine the party, which is the ultimate red line for any apparatchik such as Mao.
Of course, by adopting such a disingenuous stance with the international community, China ultimately achieves that same undermining result anyway. By appointing, promoting, and then “disappearing” officials in short order, Xi also looks to be either vulnerable or incompetent. And he breeds the perception that Beijing, fundamentally, cannot be trusted.