Opinion Express View on the disappearing Chinese minister
Amid speculation about Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang's absence and sacking, remembering a Kundera story
Qin Gang, who was recently seen as a dynamic young leader close to Xi, has been removed as China's foreign minister. For months, though, China watchers and the international media as a whole have been speculating about Qin’s absence — or more accurately, his disappearance. 
Long before AI-created deepfakes, totalitarian societies made it impossible to trust the evidence of your senses. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera provides an example: A photograph from February 21, 1948, shows Vladimir Clementis standing next to Klement Gottwald, the leader of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party. In 1950, Clementis is erased from the photograph, after he is charged with being a “deviationist” — essentially, the secular version of heresy used by scientific socialists to remove and cut inconvenient party colleagues to size. There are many differences between the Soviet-style communism of the mid-20th century and Xi Jinping’s capitalist socialism in contemporary China. But Kundera’s parable applies to both.
Qin Gang, who was recently seen as a dynamic young leader close to Xi, has been removed as China’s foreign minister. For months, though, China watchers and the international media as a whole have been speculating about Qin’s absence — or more accurately, his disappearance. He was not seen in public from June 25 until his sacking earlier this week. Officially, he was away for “health reasons”. Unofficially, the rumours range from political intrigue to an extra-marital affair.
It is likely, of course, that the Qin Gang episode will fade from memory soon after it moves away from the headlines. After all, Orwellian disappearances and subsequent rehabilitations are par for the course in China: Tennis star Peng Shuai, Jack Maa, activist Chen Quishi, actress Zhao Wei — the list goes on. Each case seems a throwback to the opacity of the Cold War era in the so-called information age. But what if, as Kundera put it, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”? It seems that struggle is a losing battle. In a time when the recent plights of refugees, migrants and minorities are forgotten in months, there is little chance that a cabinet reshuffle will leave much of an impression. And deepfakes are so much easier now.
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