Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang was fired from his position as Beijing’s top diplomat on Tuesday after a Chinese Communist Party internal investigation discovered he had fathered a love child in the United States while serving as ambassador to Washington.
The alleged extramarital relationship between Qin and the mother of the child apparently spanned the entirety of his 18-month stay in Washington, DC, when he served as the chief diplomat for negotiations with the US, China’s main rival.
Although the identities of Qin’s mistress and child are unknown to the general public, rumors regarding his close relationship with Cambridge-educated Phoenix TV presenter Fu Xiaotian, who vanished from view around the same time Qin was last seen in his professional position, have been circulating online for months.
When Qin was appointed foreign minister, the Chinese government’s equivalent of the US secretary of state, he relocated from Washington to Beijing, where he had previously worked as a valued advisor to Xi.
Even though Qin’s time in office was brief, he managed US-China relations during an uncertain period that included the postponement of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit when Washington learned that Beijing had sent a spy balloon into US airspace.
Qin oversaw China’s messaging campaign denying the balloon was intentionally sent across the US after President Biden ordered the military to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina last February. Qin tried to persuade Washington that the balloon was a “civilian airship” that had veered off course.
This past June, Qin met with Blinken as part of the secretary’s rescheduled visit to Beijing in one of his final official acts in an effort to defuse the simmering US-China tensions that have alarmed much of the globe.
Qin’s absence was initially explained by health issues, according to China’s foreign ministry, but rumors intensified after Xi deposed Qin in July without providing an explanation.
Social media investigators saw that Fu shared screenshots of her conversation with Gang from her show “Talk with World Leaders” and a photo of her newborn son Er-Kin on X on April 10.
Others saw the couple made more eye contact than normal, giving the interview an appearance of flirtation. All conversations concerning the pair’s laid-back conduct on the Chinese social media site Weibo were swiftly blocked.
