China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang has not been seen in public since June 25.
Is he unwell, or has he been purged?
When Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang didn't turn up at last week's East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers Meeting in Jakarta, it was stated that he was unwell.
Wang Yi, China's No. 1 diplomat and director of the Chinese Communist party central committee foreign affairs commission -- and Qin's boss -- represented the People's Republic at the Jakarta event.
Now it is speculated that the reason for Qin's absence may not be health-related, but linked to his alleged relationship with a Hong Kong-based journalist Fu Xiaotian.
Qin was last seen in public on June 25, meeting Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ali Sabry and Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son in Beijing.
A week earlier, on June 18, he met United States Secretary of State Antony J Blinken in Beijing. As you can see from these images, Qin doesn't look ill.
Now Beijing watchers claim Qin -- who has had a meteoric ascent in the last year, rising from China's ambassador to the US to foreign minister -- may have been purged by Xi Jinping because of an allegedly improper relationship with Fu Xiaotian, who, by the way, has also disappeared from view.
Fu and Qin's relationship -- if indeed there was one -- reportedly began after she interviewed him for her show Talk with World Leaders last year.
The evidence is purely circumstantial based on Fu's posts on Weibo -- the Chinese version of Twitter -- where she announced the birth of her son Er-kin, born months, China-watchers allege, after she interviewed Qin in Washington, DC.
Then, on March 19 this year, she posted birthday greetings without identifying who the wishes were meant for. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots since Qin was born on March 19, 1966.
Qin's absence from the Jakarta meeting was not the first time he has been missing from a recent gathering of foreign ministers. He stayed away from the BRICS foreign ministers meeting in Cape Town on June 1, sending Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu in his place.
Observers of the opaque ways of the Chinese Communist party and its leaders surmise that Qin angered Xi -- who promoted him from diplomat to leader of the People's Republic's diplomatic army -- by his alleged relationship with Fu.
Xi is almost Stalin-like in his ruthlessness when people anger him -- witness what happened to Ali Baba's Jack Ma -- or prop themselves up as his rivals, so it is possible that Qin may have been purged.
If it has indeed happened, it would be the first such occurence in Xi's circle of ministers and Communist party leaders in his third, unprecedented, term as China's unchallenged leader.
We will know Qin's fate soon if spurious charges are brought against him or if he resumes his job in the days to come.
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