Charles Wooley: Why one of China’s most powerful men suddenly vanished

It seems like love is in the air for one of China’s most powerful men, who was suddenly replaced after seven months in the job.

Sometimes it’s almost reassuring to find that whether in tyrannies or democracies, politicians the world over are all pretty much the same in their overweening ambitions, their vanities and their frailties.

We can be terrified by the goose-stepping, machine-like coldness of a frighteningly armed Orwellian machine seemingly intent on remaking the world in its own image.

So perhaps we might be a little relieved to find that in the front ranks of such a regime there might beat hearts just as human and romantically vulnerable as found so often in our own decadent Western governances.

Whatever the ideology, there’s always the same chance of tripping up because we are all human and all of us evolved (hopefully still evolving) from chimpanzees who came out of Africa about a million years ago.

The Western media (the media of the free world, as some prefer to call it) has made much this past week of a high-level change in power in the court of Beijing.

Qin Gang, China’s Foreign Minister disappeared after just seven months in the job. Picture: Xinhua

China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who was due in Australia in late July, has been abruptly replaced after only seven months in the job. On Tuesday the National People’s Congress announced that 57-year-old Mr Qin, a former ambassador to Washington, regarded as a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party and sometimes as a potential successor to President Xi Jinping, had been replaced by his predecessor Wang Yi.

Qin, who was one of the most powerful men in China, hasn’t been seen or heard of since.

It’s that kind of place.

Then the rumours started to swirl; apparently in a more-than-literal interpretation of his foreign relationship role, former ambassador Qin had a love child in the United States.

Even in a nation without a free press, saying nothing about such matters is counter-productive. It only fuels absurd speculation: he was a spy; he has cancer. But by volume the greatest speculation online in China and reported with relish from Taiwan and Hong Kong is that Qin Gang’s disappearance is the result of being “caught out having an extramarital affair” with celebrity Hong Kong television journalist Fu Xiaotian.

Social media went mad during the interview, convinced that the two were “flirting” throughout the broadcast.

China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang waves as he arrives for a press conference at the Media Center of the National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing on March 7, 2023. Picture: AFP

True or not, Fu Xiaotian has also vanished from the screen, along with her putative lover.

Social media is in most part an appalling corruption of the values of liberal society. It is of little consolation that it can have much the same unpleasant effects in the land of TikTok.

From time to time politicians in Australia “retire to spend more time with their families”. Our media tend to be more censorious about these matters than in many other nations.

I have always avoided such stories, except for one time in London in the mid-1980s when Maggie Thatcher sacked her transport minister Cecil Parkinson for impropriety. It was a headline story in London, the kind the Brit press loves because Parkinson’s former secretary Sara Keays was pregnant with his child.

Prurience has always sold papers, so it was no surprise that all the angles were vigorously pursued. The French president Francois Mitterrand happened to be visiting London, and at his press conference the Anglo-French relationship was the furthest thing from the reporter’s minds. It was the Parkinson-Keays relationship and Thatcher’s moralistic reproach that was the order of the day.

“President Mitterrand, Mrs Thatcher has just sacked her Cabinet minister Cecil Parkinson for having an affair. What do you think about that?”

Mitterrand would have been expecting it: “Well, in reply to your question, I must say that it is not for me to comment on the internal political affairs of a friendly government.”

And the British media would not have been expecting any other answer.

But in a brilliant flourish of Gallic insouciance, Mitterrand continued: “But you ask me, and I can only say as president, that if I sacked every one of my Cabinet ministers who had a mistress, then I would have no Cabinet.”

Flight of fantasy

A couple of weeks ago in this column I discovered Raptor Refuge and the great work they do caring for and protecting Tasmania’s birdlife.

Yesterday Craig Webb, who runs the outfit on a 20-acre property near Kettering, invited me to see the release of an injured and now recovered wedge-tailed eagle. The bird was returned to the wild after being nursed back to fitness in one of the world’s largest raptor flight aviaries.

Craig says this was one of the few rescues in which a bird’s injuries were not the result of human activity. The eagle had somehow managed to get its foot caught in the fork of a wattle tree and was found hanging upside down.

Ziggy Webb (son of Craig) releasing the wedge-tailed eagle on the Tasmania's East Coast on Friday. Picture: Jim Wooley

“We fixed her strained ligaments and tendons and got her back to flying-fit,’’ Craig said. “She’s a big girl and weighs about 6kg with a wingspan of 2.4 metres.”

I’ve seen them often enough at distance in bush, but I’ve never got to eyeball one before. Nothing quite prepares you for a close encounter with such a magnificent creature. It is quite an experience.

But this bird was never made for a zoo and Craig was quite right that there is no more exhilarating experience than seeing an eagle returned to the wild.

“People ask me do I get emotionally attached,’’ Craig said. “I always say no. I’m thrilled to put them back.”

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.