Shocking Twist: Mysterious Disappearance of Second Chinese Minister Leaves Everyone Wondering!

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu told a China-Africa security forum in Beijing last month that the world was entering a new period of “instability.”

Just over two weeks later, officials and experts outside China are raising questions about the sustainability of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s cabinet, after Li became the second high-level minister to disappear with little or no explanation from the public in less than two months.

US officials told the Financial Times they believed Li was removed from office in a pattern that appeared to follow that of former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who mysteriously disappeared in June and was officially replaced a month later. His fate is unknown.

“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the State of Denmark,'” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel posted Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.

A week earlier, Emanuel had written that the Chinese government “now resembles Agatha Christie’s novel.” And then there was none“.

While top Chinese officials are periodically purged for corruption, analysts say no two ministers have disappeared in this manner in recent decades, especially in such rapid succession.

Their situation – which comes just six months after Xi announced the composition of his new cabinet as part of the inauguration of his third five-year term – reinforces the impression that the decision-making process is becoming even less transparent at a time when China is struggling to revive its domestic policy and politics. the confidence of foreign investors in a struggling economy.

Unlike the removal of previous top officials, Li and Qin were both hand-picked by Xi, making it harder for the president to deflect blame for their failures.

“It’s very unusual. I could not have imagined in such a short time that two very important ministers would disappear and without any information,” said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

Although the defense minister has little power, he is the face of the People’s Liberation Army to the outside world. An aerospace engineer With little international visibility, Li was confirmed as defense minister in March after joining the Central Military Commission, China’s top military body, last October.

Internationally, Li’s appointment was controversial from the start. In 2018, the United States imposed sanctions on him for carrying out transactions with individuals affiliated with Russian defense or intelligence sectors. Li was at the time director of an agency that planned, developed and purchased weapons for the PLA.

China refused to let Li meet with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin while sanctions were in place, complicating military relations between the two countries.

U.S. officials said Li was under investigation for corruption, but one said it was unclear whether that was related to his time as head of the department responsible for development and procurement of weapons.

In July, the Central Military Commission, chaired by Xi, announced a corruption investigation in equipment purchasing for almost six years. The following month Xi removed the two main generals to the PLA’s Rocket Force, which oversees the country’s missiles and nuclear weapons, in the biggest shake-up of military leadership in a decade. Li was not named in these investigations.

While many analysts view Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns as politically motivated, one U.S. official said corruption was endemic within the PLA, inhibiting the president’s ambitions to turn it into a force capable of tasks such as submit Taiwan. “He [corruption] has had a profound effect on what they are able to do and how they do it,” the official said.

Officially, China has said nothing about Li’s whereabouts. The Foreign Ministry said Friday it was “unfamiliar with the situation.” Reuters on Thursday cited Vietnamese officials as saying that Li canceled a meeting last week due to a “health issue” – the same reason given by the Foreign Ministry at the start of Qin’s absence.

“Anyone who [has been] publicly claimed [as having] health problems will never be healthy in the future,” said a user on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media service, in one of the few uncensored posts about Li.

Although no mention of Li was made in state media, analysts said the rapid purges of the two ministers revealed problems beneath the surface within Xi’s government.

Lyle Morris, a former China official at the Pentagon and now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the investigation was a “big deal” that raised questions about the selection process, since Xi has a large team which studies candidates for high government positions.

He said the situation was embarrassing for Xi and reflected a weakness in the Chinese system in terms of instability, but warned it could also be a sign of the president’s power.

“Maybe Xi is inserting himself into a highly corrupt system, so in a paradoxical way he is showing his strength with his ability to overthrow someone so early in his term,” Morris said.

Xi was already facing growing political challenges after his zero-Covid strategy last year pushed the economy into a slump from which it struggled to emerge, with growth slowing in the second quarter.

“There’s speculation that his top aides aren’t aligned enough with him, so he’s probably using that [the crackdowns] to further strengthen loyalty to his leadership. Not only on the civilian side, but also on the military side,” Yu Ping, China expert and former member of NYU’s Asian American Law Institute.

The risk was that as Xi consolidated his power – at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) last year, he installed loyalists in top leadership positions and excluded rival factions – such purges Apparent events would become more regular, said NUS’s Wu.

Officials compete to show loyalty and try to expose their rivals’ weaknesses, he said. In an article on the tensions between Xi’s top officials, Guoguang Wu, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, said these disputes explained many of China’s contradictory policies, such as the attempt to attract external investors while conducting domestic activities. security raids against foreign consultants.

“When the supreme leader controls everything, ironically, the CCP regime becomes less politically stable and more inconsistent in terms of governance,” Wu wrote in The China Leadership Monitor magazine this month.

The other risk with sudden and apparent purges of ministers is that they could further strip other senior officials of their power, making them less inclined to take bold steps to solve the country’s problems, analysts say. Foreign countries will also question whether it is worth engaging deeply with ministers, knowing they lack influence.

World leaders will “ask themselves whether they really need to talk to [a given minister] or if this person is going to last a very long time,” Yu said.

With additional reporting by Kathrin Hille in New York