The announcement on December 30, 2022 of Qin Gang as China’s next Foreign Minister has underlined the extent to which Chinese President Xi Jinping is closely shaping China’s foreign policy as he starts his third term, including by deciding key diplomatic personnel appointments.
Mr. Qin (pronounced ‘chin’), 56, has taken over from Wang Yi , 69, who was, in October, promoted to the Communist Party’s 25-member Politburo. A veteran diplomat and formerly a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Qin’s career has seen a meteoric rise ever since his appointment as Mr. Xi’s chief protocol officer, shortly after he took over as President in 2013. The relationship he struck with Mr. Xi, while working in close proximity to organise both outgoing visits and hosting of foreign leaders, has sparked that rise, with the Chinese President appearing to entrust him to carry out his diplomatic agenda.
Indeed, there are many aspects to Mr. Qin’s appointment that have broken the carefully followed precedent in China’s diplomatic bureaucracy. Even the timing of the appointment itself, announced in end-December, was precedent-defying — Foreign Ministers, as well as other ministerial appointments, are usually formally announced in March at the meeting of the National People’s Congress, or Parliament. The NPC will also announce a new Premier, expected to be another Xi loyalist, the second-ranked leader Li Qiang.
Mr. Qin, who started his diplomatic career in the Department of West European Affairs and subsequently had two postings in the U.K ., first came to prominence as a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, where he largely adopted a smoother tone than some of his “wolf warrior” successors, as the recently more hardline Chinese diplomats are known, named after a patriotic Chinese action film.
In 2014, during Mr. Xi’s second year as President, Mr. Qin was moved out from the Information Department, which he was heading at the time as top spokesperson, to take over the Protocol Department, an increasingly important assignment given Mr. Xi’s personalised approach to diplomacy. As head of protocol, Mr. Qin was closely involved in arranging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2015 visit to China, including a long “walk and talk” with Mr. Xi at the famous Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an. Mr. Qin and Mr. Xi were seen having several close conversations during the visit.
Rapid promotions followed, first as an Assistant Foreign Minister in 2017 and then as one of the four Vice Foreign Ministers the following year, although he had by then never occupied an Ambassadorial role to any country. Despite not having that experience, Mr. Qin was sent by Mr. Xi in 2021 to Washington for his first Ambassadorial appointment — another first for China’s diplomatic corps, and one that underlined Mr. Xi’s trust in him — to steer what is for China its most important, and increasingly its most fractious, relationship.
Diplomatic priorities
Mr. Qin will now be tasked with shaping Mr. Xi’s diplomatic agenda during his third five-year term, which began in October. In a December 26 article in The National Interest, published shortly before he left Washington, Mr. Qin provided some clues about his diplomatic priorities, which echoed closely with recent messages from Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi has described the current geopolitical moment as one with “changes unseen in a century” and where China is “moving to the centre stage”, and has abandoned the more cautious “bide your time, hide your brightness” maxim of former leader Deng Xiaoping .
Mr. Qin pushed back strongly against suggestions from many in the West that China under Mr. Xi was a “power poised to ‘break the status quo’”.
“The tension across the Taiwan Strait was not created by the Chinese mainland breaking the status quo, but by ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists and external forces continually challenging the status quo,” he said. “In the case of the East China Sea, it was Japan who attempted to ‘nationalise’ Diaoyu Dao ten years ago, altering the ‘status quo’... In the South China Sea, the status quo is that regional countries are consulting on a code of conduct that will lead to meaningful and effective rules for the region. As to the border issues between China and India, the status quo is that both sides are willing to ease the situation and jointly protect peace along their borders.”
He also reiterated another of Mr. Xi’s favoured messages — that the world was at a “crossroads” and countries were faced with choices to make between what Beijing has called “bloc politics”, referring implicitly to the U.S . and its allies, and its own vision for the world. “If people choose to see the world from a ‘democracy vs. authoritarianism’ perspective,” he wrote, “they will very likely usher in a world of division, competition, and conflict.”
