Chinas „verschwundener“ Außenminister wurde auf einen niederen Posten im Verlagswesen degradiert, sagen ehemalige US-Beamte. Qin Gang, ein aggressiver Diplomat im „Wolfskrieger“-Stil, hatte einen kometenhaften Aufstieg und einen noch schnelleren Fall in Ungnade. Er soll jetzt ein Gehalt bei einem staatlichen Buchhändler in Peking beziehen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/08/qin-gang-whereabouts-foreign-minister/
9 Comments
Seems like a decent outcome for a “fall from grace in CCP politics” story.
At least he didn’t fall out of a window
Remind me of a song that start with, “What goes up, must come down.”
Wolf Warrior has been such an epic own-goal by the Chinese. I fully respect that the Chinese have their own schools of thought and diversity of opinion, but when you think how the world COULD be right now vs. what it actually is right now as a result of this turn it’s just an absolute shame.
We were in a world where the Chinese most likely would have overtaken the US bloodlessly by sheer trade and mutual ties. If you think what the US’s complaints were in 2008, they were mostly valid – we were economically trading with a partner that past a certain point of development became blatantly disadvantageous. China had a choice; move into the next phase of the relationship or go back to old world shenanigans. The interesting thing about next phase; it literally just meant less protectionism from the Chinese side OR more being allowed from the US side. They were just too big at that point to allow some of the more blatant mercantilist stuff which makes sense when you’re a developing economy.
Unfortunately they went towards the latter which scared the hell out of every local partner they had that weren’t already explicitly under their thumb (or in some cases explicitly dislike the US) and built their own antagonists. Everyone has less as a result. It will be interesting if South America and the African continents benefit from this long term. For people who didn’t like Operation Condor; this is how you got operation Condor. South America and Africa didn’t benefit then, because it was the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc constantly undercutting each other elsewhere in the world invariably built up dictatorships that otherwise would have fallen on their own.
The article doesn’t mention it in detail, but Qin had an affair with a Chinese TV presenter. Their child was born by surrogate in California. Having a child by surrogate is illegal in China, but legal in most of the US. That affair, and the child, were the reason for Qin getting demoted.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/27/china/china-qin-gang-fu-xiaotian-intl-hnk/index.html
So a “coffee boy”
Or, maybe, his family recently received a bill for the cost of one 9mm bullet…
r/books might like this 😆
Where there is life there is hope.