Beijing fires Qin Gang and replaces him with top diplomat Wang Yi in move to minimize foreign relations’ disruptions
A month after China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang disappeared from public view, he’s out of a job. And few in Washington are likely to miss him.amid mounting questions about his mysterious absence from any public official duties.
Qin — who served as Beijing’s ambassador to the U.S. for 15 months before he was promoted to foreign minister— had a reputation as a prickly interlocutor in Washington. And the Biden administrationfor long stretches, making his tenure in D.C. a difficult one. The consensus in Washington was that “Qin had been particularly difficult and that he had not been very effective as ambassador,” said Zack Cooper, former assistant to the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism at the National Security Council. “It’s not like we’ve lost a critical piece of the U.S.-China puzzle — it might be that we’ve removed an impediment.”— complete with the Twitter hashtag #WhereisQinGang — has flown thick and fast in recent weeks.
Qin’s departure is a reputational blow to Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping, who picked Qin for the role in 2022 over. “This episode will be seen as an embarrassing lapse in judgment at the top,” said Daniel Russel, a former senior Asia hand in the Obama administration. That lack of experience may have contributed to Qin’s difficulties as ambassador. Qin was “a classic by-the-book, by-the-script kind of guy who would parrot Xi Jinping and didn’t take time to develop relationships,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has spoken with multiple members of the D.C. foreign policy establishment who met with Qin while he was in D.C.
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