Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang’s unexplained absence sparks a flurry of speculation, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry again pushes climate cooperation in Beijing, and new Chinese economic data confirms a lagging recovery from COVID-19.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, a former ambassador to the United States, has not appeared in public for three weeks, including skipping events such as a recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference. There has been no official explanation for his absence, except for a brief mention of “health reasons” ahead of the ASEAN meeting, sparking speculation that he is under government investigation.

When asked about Qin’s whereabouts at a press conference on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said she had “no information to give,” and the question was left out of the official transcript. In an article in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, references to Qin were removed without consultation with the author.

While it is possible that Qin is under investigation—and in the past, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials have disappeared into detention long before any announcement—there is no clear reason for a probe. The 57-year-old Qin is one of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s good little soldiers, recently adopting a nationalist line after a largely conventional diplomatic career. The foreign minister has been linked to TV anchor Fu Xiaotian, although the evidence is circumstantial; Fu has also disappeared from view.

Yet the alleged affair would be a symptom of Qin’s political fall, not a cause of it. Engaging in an affair isn’t enough to condemn an official because it is such a normalized part of the life of the powerful in a country where there are few women in leadership. For example, retired senior official Zhang Gaoli was relatively unscathed by accusations of sexual assault by tennis player Peng Shuai; Peng disappeared for months. But if Qin is facing political problems, anyone connected to him is a potential target.

The rumor mill about missing Chinese political figures is rarely accurate. In 2021, the supposed disappearance of Dong Jingwei, a deputy minister of security, led to claims that he had defected to the West and had information about COVID-19 being a bioweapon—among other imaginative theories. Although Dong reemerged (and didn’t seem to be missing in the first place), the claims continue in U.S. right-wing media. The Chinese diaspora is full of similar defector rumors; the Dong story made it to English-language media because of COVID-19 paranoia.

Rumors about official disappearances flourish in large part because of the CCP’s obsession with maintaining secrecy. Coverage of the political leadership is obsessively controlled; even mid-ranking provincial officials live in partially isolated compounds. Inside the party system, officials are often reluctant to share their own schedules with one another because it would give away too much about their connections. Xi himself went missing for two weeks in September 2012, just before taking power; there has never been an official explanation.

At the same time, Chinese officials, including high-ranking leaders, do routinely disappear into the maws of the state. So do prominent celebrities and business leaders who accidentally cross the CCP’s ever-shifting red lines. Such disappearances have accelerated under Xi, who has purged high-level politicians as part of a campaign targeted both at corruption and at securing his hold on power.

But there’s another possible explanation that could match up with the few known facts: a bad case of COVID-19. China has done its best to make the public forget the virus since abandoning its zero-COVID policy late last year. The official figures remain impossibly low, but briefly public data suggests that the real death toll last winter may have been much higher. There have been hints of a wave of infections this summer; if Qin is hospitalized with COVID-19, it would make his absence even more sensitive.

John Kerry’s Beijing visit. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is in Beijing this week for climate talks, maintaining that cooperation on climate change mitigation can improve overall diplomatic relations between China and the United States. I made the case for skepticism on this last week, and Kerry has been knocking on Beijing’s door without getting any answer for years. But there is clearly some desperation in Washington for any way to get the Chinese to the table, and climate change is also a politically convenient liberal cause.

That’s also the fundamental problem: China isn’t going to put any weight on deals that a future Republican administration could undo or that the Republican-led Congress could stall.

Bioweapon conspiracy theories. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist challenging U.S. President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in next year’s election, recently made news for falsely claiming that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—suggesting that China and the United States have the capacity for such bioweapons. These weapons do not exist, but the claims stem from mutual delusions of both U.S. and Chinese nationalists.

Fears around ethnically targeted bioweapons are decades old. In the 2010s, Chinese military academics claimed that the United States was creating ethnically targeted bioweapons to wipe out China’s Han ethnic majority. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Western media revived these theories as evidence that the Chinese were engineering such bioweapons. In turn, China has doubled down, leading to new Russian propaganda claims about Ukrainian labs with Western funding—picked up by conspiracy theorists such as Kennedy.

• The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine by Adrian Karatnycky
• Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage by Adam Tooze
• Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States by Christina Lu and Anusha Rathi

Economic lag. Data confirming a feeble post-COVID economic recovery in China continued to trickle out this week, with weak GDP growth for the second quarter, youth unemployment still high, and retail sales struggling. Many analysts have cut their forecasts for the year to 5 percent GDP growth—a figure that would be great for a developed country but is far below China’s expected norm.

As ever, it’s not clear just how bad the economic picture is. One fundamental problem is that the CCP’s main ideological goal of the moment—prioritizing a narrow conception of national security over everything else—comes up against the goal of juicing the economy. That mismatch is causing conflicts within the government over issues such as foreign direct investment, which has declined sharply compared with last year.

Officials in Washington long assumed that the leadership in Beijing was fundamentally pragmatic on economic issues, but as Kurt Campbell, the White House’s top Asia advisor, pointed out in a recent interview, the pressure of ideology is stronger than ever.

Drone concerns. Italy is slowly forcing Chinese investors out of a local drone firm called Alpi Aviation. In 2018, a Hong Kong-based shell company called Mars Information Technology took a 75 percent share in the firm while concealing the origins of the money, raising serious concerns because of Alpi’s role as a supplier for the Italian military. The investors include the Wuxi provincial government and a Chinese state railway firm—a strange combination.

Last year, Italy’s government mandated a sale of the shares and blocked Alpi from accessing some key airfields, but it seems that Mars could still play a role. Chinese drones are becoming a critical issue, as Faine Greenwood recently wrote in Foreign Policy, and U.S. lawmakers are now cracking down on Chinese-made drones, which make up most of the civilian drone market.