Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang died of torture or committed suicide in Beijing military hospital.

The former minister had stopped appearing in public since June 25: His disappearance has sparked a lot of rumors both in #China and abroad.

Politico's sources told the publication that the last foreign official Qin Gang hosted was Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko. According to the publication, Rudenko may have informed the Chinese leadership that Qin Gang and several other officials were cooperating with Western intelligence services.

There has been no official comment from the Chinese authorities on the fate of the former minister.

The former Chinese foreign minister was at the center of a scandal because of an affair with a Chinese journalist who worked in the United States. The official's son, who was granted American citizenship, was born there.

After Qin Gang disappeared, the chief commander of the missile forces Li Yuchao, his deputy Liu Guangbing and ex-deputy Zhang Zhenzhong disappeared around the same time. In October 2023, Defense Minister Li Shanfu was sent into retirement. All of them were suspected of collaborating with Western intelligence agencies.

Since his reign began in 2012, Xi Jinping’s endless purges have removed millions of officials — from top-ranked Communist Party “tigers” down to lowly bureaucratic “flies,” to use Xi’s evocative terminology.

Millions of officials? This must be a typo?

Dang, it's only a matter of time before the US follows suit to remain competitive.

Total speculation, obviously, but putting all this information about military purges together, it looks like China did some internal checks on its military capabilities after the Russian military fell apart in the early months in Ukraine. The results caused Xi's personal friends to get fired and others to get tortured and killed. The western spy angle could have been true for some of them, but is likely a convenient reason to sell the purge to the public.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

While the world is distracted by war in the Middle East and Ukraine, a Stalin-like purge is sweeping through China’s ultra-secretive political system, with profound implications for the global economy and even the prospects for peace in the region.

With such a febrile atmosphere in the celestial capital of Beijing, there are fears that an isolated and paranoid Chairman Xi could miscalculate, provoke armed conflict with one of its weaker neighbors or even launch a full-scale invasion of democratic Taiwan in order to distract from his domestic troubles.

“We see a China domestically that is challenged; an aging society, demography, a severe housing crisis, slowing down growth, unexpected unemployment because the young generation leaving university does not find adequate jobs in the private sector anymore,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who heads to Beijing this week with her European Council counterpart Charles Michel for the first face-to-face EU-China meeting in nearly five years, told POLITICO last week.

Fu attended Cambridge University, a traditional recruiting ground for Britain’s intelligence agencies, and first met Qin more than a decade ago when he was posted to the Chinese Embassy in London.

In 2016, Churchill College, Fu’s alma mater at Cambridge, named a garden after her in gratitude for her “very rare … series of generous gifts,” reportedly adding up to at least ￡250,000, an enormous sum for most journalists.

It said Wang Shaojun, commander since 2015 of the Central Guard unit that protects China’s top leaders and oversees Chairman Xi’s personal bodyguard, had died three months earlier due to “ineffective medical treatment.”

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