Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I’m in Cleveland this weekend, hiking the trails of Cuyahoga Valley National Park (ahhhh) and watching the Phillies lose 1-0 to the Guardians (agggghhhh). I can say with reasonable certainty that I haven’t spotted Chinese Foreign Minister and Xi Jinping protégé Qin Gang in Ohio—so that’s one place where he isn’t. But where is Qin Gang? This is the question that has animated many discussions of Party-state politics in the past week.

Strictly speaking, Qin Gang has actually been out of sight for almost a month; his last official public appearance was on June 25. Since then, all of Qin’s engagements have been cancelled or handled by others, without much in the way of explanation. As Chris Buckley and David Pierson report at the New York Times, “Abrupt disappearances of senior Chinese officials from public life are often seen as potential signs of trouble.” But what, exactly, is the trouble? Half of the people I follow on Twitter are confident that Qin has suffered a political downfall, his invisibility a sure sign that he’s being investigated for corruption. The other half of my Twitter circles are just as confident that those people are reading way too much into the situation; they hypothesize that Qin could have fallen ill with something like a bad case of Covid and point out that China-watchers routinely engage in wild speculation based on the scantest of tea leaves. CCP officials—most famously Xi Jinping, shortly before ascending to power—do sometimes vanish from public view for weirdly long periods of time, then pop up and proceed with their careers, no explanation given or long-term consequences apparent.

The speculation will continue running wild until either Qin Gang shows up or the PRC government puts out a statement regarding his fate. Until then [I pause my typing and look around the brunch crowd at Café Avalaun] nope, he’s not here.

Sinocism subscribers can listen to Bill Bishop and Andrew Sharp discuss Qin Gang’s disappearance in last week’s episode of the Sharp China podcast.

I liked the context offered by this piece in The Economist, “China’s Foreign Minister Goes Missing”:

However this episode ends, it is a reminder that China’s capital, for all its Tesla showrooms and Apple stores and outward marks of globalised modernity, remains a tough place. It is a city of secrets and rumours. Grandees do sometimes vanish, before reappearing to face charges of corruption, immorality or dissent. In an age when other countries’ leaders drop indiscretions on social media or in interviews, China’s ruling classes heed codes of silence that would be familiar to Communist Party cadres of the 1950s.

Recommended Readings

China Stories
Nithin Coca, “Zombie Supply Chains: Thanks to the Chinese market, unsustainable supply chains in SouthEast Asia just won’t go away”
Bob Davis, “Kurt Campbell on Talking to China Again”
Carlos Lozada, “A Look Back at Our Future War with China”
Timothy McLaughlin, “The Fracturing of Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement”
Ana Swanson, “House Committee Targets U.C. Berkeley Program for China Ties”

Wandering Around the World [all, coincidentally, from the New Yorker this week]
Jill Lepore, “The Bear in Your Backyard” — a review essay about Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie, a new book that I’m waiting for the library to get
Emily Nussbaum, “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville”
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold”

The Ones to Click
Jemimah Steinfeld, “Afghans who supported the British government’s mission now face death”
This is a powerful article by the editor of Index on Censorship, discussing the tragic situations that many journalists from Afghanistan face. After working to support foreign governments fighting the Taliban, they are now caught between the dual crises of political repression and economic collapse:

Among the worst affected are Afghan journalists. The fall of Kabul meant the fall of independent media. An industry that took years to nurture and grow vanished overnight, leaving most without a job and a stable source of income. At the same time the Taliban’s relentless attack on dissent has made these people a primary target. Those who are left behind find themselves faced with both starvation and assassination.

Krithika Varagur, “Love In the Time of Sickle Cell Disease”
This is a sensitive and compelling look at what it’s like to live and love in a time of genetic profiling. For many people in Nigeria, holding the recessive gene for sickle cell disease has little effect on their daily lives. When it comes to dating, marriage, and having children, though, that gene assumes a critical importance, with the potential to affect future generations. Krithika Varagur explains it all in an article that has been on my mind all week.

Feature photo: Post-game fireworks at Progressive Field after the Guardians beat the Phillies, 1-0, on July 22, 2023.