Eating watermelon with Wu Guoguang — a summer seminar in China watching

According to China’s agrarian calendar, Major Heat (大暑 dàshǔ), the twelfth solar term of the year, began on July 23 and will continue until August 7. It is also the height of the watermelon season.

Back in 2016, “watermelon-eating masses” (吃瓜群众 chīguā qúnzhòng) was one of the buzzwords of the year. Originating in such terms as “eat melon seeds in the front row” (前排吃瓜子 qiánpái chī guāzǐ), which described traditional theater audiences and gawkers alike, it now described the online hordes who took vicarious pleasure in observing, but not necessarily commenting on, celebrity gossip and political rumors. The year 2016 also happened to be the year that members of the Communist Party were strictly banned from “inappropriately commenting on Party Central and its major policies” 妄议党中央大政方针 (wàng yì dǎng zhōngyāng dàzhèng fāngzhēn).

The inhabitants of Beijing have been amused, horrified, and affected by political intrigue since 1421, when Zhū Dì 朱棣, who usurped the Ming throne and ruled as the Yongle Emperor, designated his former power base as the imperial capital.

The Major Heat of 2023 gave the watermelon-eating masses in China and around the world a double spectacle: First there was the ongoing absence of Qín Gāng 秦刚, the newly appointed foreign minister who disappeared on June 25 and was dismissed from office on July 25. Then there was the viral hit song by Dāo Láng 刀郎, “Land of the Rakshasas & the Sea Market” (羅剎海市 luóchà hǎishì). The metaphor-laden lyrics of the song gave expression to a range of popular frustrations and pent-up emotions. Within a week of its release, it had inspired countless TikTok memes and had been downloaded some 8 billion times.

Below we translate an essay by Wú Guóguāng 吳國光, a political scientist at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and author of China’s Party Congress: Power, Legitimacy, and Institutional Manipulation (Cambridge University Press, 2015). As a young policy adviser to Zhào Zǐyáng 赵紫阳 in the late 1980s and a longtime analyst of Chinese politics, Wu knows of which he speaks. (See, for example, his conversation with Li Yuan [袁莉 Yuán Lì] of the New York Times on the mysterious ouster of Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛, former General Secretary of the Communist Party, at the closing ceremony of the 20th Party Congress on October 22, 2022.)

In the introduction to the series Watching China Watching I observed that “some of the greatest China Watchers are from China [and for them] China was not a distant subject for study but an essential part of lived reality. Their insights were generally based not on some crude social science or anthropological approach to observing The Other, or the result of dissecting an object rich in possibility as part of some ambitious career trajectory. Their understanding was based as much on entanglement, fraught questioning, a spirit of self-discovery, and personal enrichment as the result of a lifelong effort to approach what is in fact an all-encompassing cultural-political world.”

Mindful of the popularity of watermelon eating during Major Heat, Wu Guoguang offers a sardonic and insightful response to the question “Where’s Qin Gang?,” the “big melon” 大瓜 dà guā, that is the most juicy topic for discussion of the season. In his essay, published by Voice of America on July 23 under the title “Eating Melon Sonata — ‘Where is Qin Gang’” (吃瓜奏鸣曲—“秦刚在哪里”), shortly before Qin Gang’s dismissal, Wu offers a humorous take on the thrills and spills of China watching in the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 era.

In China’s Political Silly Season, I commented on the zigzag nature of Chinese politics:

In the Xi Jinping decade, although there has been scant letup in the steady drumbeat of control, the Politburo has pursued an “artificial dialectic.” The Party’s “Third History Resolution,” adopted in November 2021, is explicit about correcting the failures of the past to make sure that both ideology and the economy are “grasped firmly with both hands” (两手抓、两手硬), even as a measure of unruly diversity struggles in tireless resistance. Thus, the old pattern of the punctilious and the cavalier goes on and it behooves those who want to appreciate, and understand, this particular dialectic to treat the issue both with all due seriousness as well as with judicious contempt.

Thus, the question “Where’s Qin Gang?” offered a summer diversion for the Chinese masses, members of the party-state and business elite, the international media, as well as China watchers everywhere. It also revealed yet another aspect of the dysfunctional heart of Xi Jinping’s rule.

The following is an “interpretive translation.” That is to say, rather than cluttering the translation with notes and bracketed explanations, I have, for the most part, incorporated them in the text.

Wu Guoguang asks “Where’s Qin Gang?”
An interpretive translation by Geremie R. Barmé

Cracking open and eating melon-seeds is a favorite Chinese pastime and summer is the height of the watermelon season. It looks like Party Central has been making an effort to provide the masses with some diversion during the hot months of the year by gifting the nation one very large melon [大瓜 dà guā, a juicy piece of gossip; a scandal]. In recent weeks, melon-eaters world wide have also been in a feeding frenzy.

The melon of the moment is “Where is Qin Gang?” In March, Qin was promoted to the position of Foreign Minister as well as to the State Council. Given that his starting point was an ambassadorship in Washington this was a great leap upward, and overnight he became the youngest member of the party-state’s ruling elite.

Then, on June 25, a mere three months into his term, Comrade Qin, a man who until that time had been a constant media presence, disappeared. Although this sparked immediate speculation the “Qin Gang Melon” didn’t go on sale until July 11, the day on which a Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced that “due to ill health” Minister Qin was unable to attend a meeting of ASEAN nations scheduled for Indonesia. We were told that Wáng Yì 王毅 , former foreign minister and head of the Communist Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission, would go in his stead. Two more weeks passed in a blur and, since Qin still hadn’t put in an appearance, people in China as well as the international media started playing the game of “Where is Qin Gang?”

Allow me to list some of the most popular answers to that question:

1. Ill Health

The first answer was the initial official explanation that Qin was not seen in public “for health reasons,” although that explanation was missing from the ministry’s transcript of the news conference.

Okay, we had to presume that Qin had been hospitalized. From that followed the question: Did Qin Gang have COVID and how bad was the infection? However, as soon as that became a point of discussion people observed that everyone knew, according to the political lexicon of the Chinese Communists, the term “health” has both a complex and particularly “unhealthy” pedigree. It’s one of those words that can mean just about anything. So, unsurprisingly, the official explanation of the minister’s untoward absence merely served to spark further furious speculation. Then, within days, the officials who’d claimed that Qin was unwell dropped the explanation. They made it pretty clear that, even if Qin Gang had been hospitalized, it wasn’t really “for health reasons” at all.

2. l’Affaire de Coeur

At this juncture Foreign Ministry personnel who were supposedly in the know came up with the second answer to the question “Where’s Qin Gang?” According to them, he was under investigation because it had been revealed that he had been having an extramarital affair and even had a lovechild.

No matter how salaciously diverting this rumor was, to the practiced observer it was not particularly plausible. Anyone familiar with the goings-on of the Party elite knows full well that such things as affairs and bastard children are no big deal. Why, you could even say that the nomenklatura has quite a reputation in this regard. Anyway, no Party official has been put under investigation for having had an affair or an illegitimate child. In fact, the opposite is true: The rule of thumb is that, if a bureaucrat is being investigated for a breach of discipline, corruption or general malfeasance, an accusation of sexual impropriety will only be added to the charge sheet at the very end of the process.

2.1 The Lover and the Spy

Okay, then, at least it was clear that Qin Gang was suffering from a good old “political illness.” He was being investigated for something serious and all that rumor-mongering about his affair, which had been covertly encouraged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was nothing more than a smokescreen. This led to a revised version of Answer Two to the question “Where’s Qin Gang?”

Word was that Qin Gang’s lover was, in fact, a double-agent. Now we were getting somewhere! This was just the kind of juicy melon that the masses could really get their teeth into. It was so 007: Fù Xiǎotiánn 傅晓田, the attractive female TV journalist for Phoenix TV with whom Qin was supposedly involved, was not only a spy, she was a double-agent to boot. Furthermore, the vixen had just brought down the youngest shooting star in the firmament of Xi Jinping’s party empire. Talk about a ready made scenario for a movie!

For a while, the Chinese internet was positively giddy with excitement and photos and video clips of the pair were posted willy-nilly. Two particular favorites were: a video of Xiaotian Fu Garden at Cambridge University, which was named after the journalist, and another of the putative lovers chatting on the rooftop of the Chinese embassy in Washington. For the melon-seed-eating masses these were a veritable feast for the eyes.

By this stage of the Qin Gang drama, some observers were experiencing serious flashbacks to 2012 when Chongqing Party Secretary Bó Xīlái 薄熙来 and Wáng Lìjūn 王立军, his police henchman, were embroiled in a political scandal. Surely you remember the dramatis personae? It also included a spy, although he was a Brit, and it too revolved around a femme fatale. In that case, it was Bo Xilai’s wife, Gǔ Kāilái 谷开来.

Like Ms. Fu Xiaotian today, Gu also indulged in the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Back then the story also bristled with details about people heady with the influence of untoward wealth and power. The details of personal vanity and material greed were highlighted by revelations about the skulduggery of China’s Communist grandees and their nefarious dealings with the Western global elite. At the time, the Bo-Gu affair perfectly encapsulated what the melon-eating masses had thought about the dark heart of Chinese politics for decades.

But, under Xi Jinping, hasn’t the party-entrepreneurial elite and its tawdry dealings with the West been put under the microscope and outlawed? How could Qin Gang in 2023 be anything more than a shabby replay of the Bo Xilai-Wang Lijun doubleheader of 2012?

And, it was at this point in the proceedings that Answer Three to the question “Where’s Qin Gang?” raised its ugly head.

3. Palace Intrigue Masquerading as Ideology

Now word had it that Qin Gang’s disappearance was related to a good old Communist Party “line struggle,” that is ideological infighting.

According to this take on things, Qin Gang was cast as a pro-U.S. dove who had been taken down by his pro-Russian factional enemies. They had supposedly gone to Xi Jinping, his patron, with a series of concocted charges. (“Qin has a huge number of enemies inside the government,” one senior U.S. official told Josh Rogin. “He was a marginally talented person, who, just through being close with Xi, catapulted up.”) Here we were, once again, in the comfortable territory of palace intrigue and a power struggle. After all, at this critical moment, everyone noticed that Tāng Tiānrú 汤天如, the wife of Zhào Lìjiān 赵立坚, the wolf warrior Foreign Affairs spokesman ousted by Qin Gang, was smugly celebrating Qin Gang’s demise online? On July 7, she said “Today’s a good day.”, the kind of line academics might say was “highly suggestive.” Added to the mix were the comments made by Xiè Fēng 谢锋, the new Chinese ambassador in Washington who, when asked about Qin Gang’s whereabouts unconvincingly mumbled “let’s wait and see,” followed by a lame “thank you for your care.” Everyone could see that he made these remarks with a somewhat jaunty expression.

Subsequently, Xie Fengwas coy when asked at the Aspen Security Forum if Qin would see Henry Kissinger, who was in Beijing meeting with his “old friend” Xi Jinping along with a clutch of other party-state officials. Then, when pressed on Qin’s whereabouts, the ambassador referred questioners back to previous non-answers that had been provided by Beijing.

But, if Qin Gang had been purged because he was in the pro-U.S. camp, then how could you explain how Xi Jinping, the leader who has devoted considerable energy to his anti-U.S. stance since last year, ended up elevating him to such a lofty and crucial post? For melon-seed eaters to be able to digest this latest nugget required further dialectical acrobatics which consisted of the explanation that Qin Gang was a masterful, two-faced and duplicitous careerist who had ensnared Xi Jinping. This claim included details about Qin’s scheming wife who helped engineer the couple’s access to Xi’s inner circle by gifting some home-made mooncakes to Péng Lìyuàn 彭丽媛, China’s First Lady. It was Machiavellian plotting at its best, although one that was keeping with the “special characteristics” of the obsession with food.

[Translator’s note: Here we recall Simon Leys’s observation that: “The psychology and behavior of Peking’s ruling clique are those of gangsters. This in not just a colorful and polemical way of speaking but a sober statement of fact, and in fact it is the underworld which might find the comparison insulting — after all its members do have some sense of honor (even of a perverse variety), personal loyalty, and a warped kind of brotherhood in arms. That is a lot more than can be said for the turncoats and cut-throats of the Forbidden City, whose ceaseless intrigues and mutual waylaying round the corners of the corridors of power, as well as their cynically shifting alliances, are proof of a lack of principle which would have brought a blush to the cheeks of the members of the secret societies of the old Shanghai underworld.”]

4. Bad Blood

Then, there was all the talk about Qin Gang’s family background and its significance. An elaborate family tree was produced that definitively linked Qin to generations of the Party gentry, a former foreign minister (through marriage), and even a leading firebrand propagandist. The only thing missing was a claim that modern-day Qin Gang is a descendant of Qín Shǐhuáng 秦始皇, the first emperor of China.

Why, didn’t you know? After all, Qin Gang shares a surname with him [though the emperor’s real name was Yíng Zhèng 嬴政]. Not to worry. Even though Lǐ Tiěyìng 李铁映 [a former Politburo member] didn’t call himself “Qin Tieying,” the rumor mill also claimed that Li was Qin Gang’s real father! None of this led anywhere and that’s why, strictly speaking, such a miscellany of misinformation doesn’t warrant being included as an answer to our question “Where’s Qin Gang?”

5. Qin Gang wants to eat watermelon, too

However, we’re all still munching on watermelons and nibbling on melon seeds. The whole point of the exercise is the freedom to gossip about everything under the sky in the process of which anyone can drag in even the most extraneous tidbit of information or data point and include it in our shared moment of entertainment. Speaking of which, this raises yet another conundrum: this time around, why hasn’t the Party imposed its usual regime of online censorship and scrubbed the Chinese internet of all of the arrant speculation? Maybe it’s one of those questions that answers itself.

In the above I’ve only been able to offer a cursory summary of the stuff that has been churned out by the rumor mills that have been running at full capacity 24/7 ever since Qin Gang went missing. The “health theory” didn’t pass muster, nor did the “sex scandal” or, for that matter, the “power struggle scenario.” The theories will continue to proliferate as long as Qin Gang doesn’t put in an appearance, or absent an official statement from the party-state. There are four main contenders at the moment, but there is no reason why they’ll stop there. Why not eight, or ten? One thing is for sure: there’ll be more than enough melon to go around. So, allow me to add my two cents worth. Since I’m not above all the speculation, let me give it a shot. My answer to the question “Where’s Qin Gang?” is so obvious that I’m surprised no one has come up with it before now. “Where’s Qin Gang?” Wherever it may, one thing is absolutely certain: Qin Gang is not free.

That then begs the question, what kind of “unfreedom” is Qin Gang being subjected to? If you want to narrow it down, he might be “unfree” and being billeted in one of those hotels where they put cadres who are under official investigation. Or, come to think of it, he could even be languishing in cell in Qincheng 秦城, literally “Qin Town,” his namesake in northwest Beijing, home to the country’s most notorious political prisoners.

Qin Gang may be living in “unfreedom” in any part of the vast party-state system or any place in China. In that sense he’s just like any other member of the Chinese masses. After all, the masses don’t really enjoy freedom or liberty of the kind you might be thinking of. The condition of “unfreedom” or circumscribed liberty is something that everyone shares in common. It is such a universal and inescapable reality that it often encourages a kind of systemic blindness. Many people think that as soon as they secure a job inside the system and work their way up into a powerful senior position, they will finally be free. My response to this widespread misconception is that in a place of unfreedom like China, no matter how much money, power or status you may enjoy, ultimately you are as unfree as everyone else.

Up to June 25 this year, Qin Gang enjoyed a measure of freedom though, at best, it was merely a kind of physiological liberty and not actual political freedom. Only the latter can ensure that you have constitutionally protected legal rights allowing you a latitude of behavior. Do any of China’s cadre-bureaucrats enjoy that kind of freedom? My answer would be “No!”

Qin Gang’s personal tragedy is that although he had a taste of, and a chance to observe freedom as a result of his years living overseas, including over a decade in the Anglosphere of England and the United States, there’s no doubt that he fooled himself into thinking that as a high-level bureaucrat he could enjoy China’s phony liberty. He remained clueless to the fact that only legal rights vouchsafe real freedom. Today, his circumstances are such that the pseudo-liberty he enjoyed as a member of China’s elite has evaporated. I wonder if Qin Gang has ever thought to himself: Why didn’t I just stay in America when I was ambassador?

Since we’re all eating the various melons provided by the summer season, why don’t we help the absent Qin Gang think up a scenario that he surely must be mulling over right now: Why didn’t he simply jump ship on the eve of leaving his ambassadorial post in Washington? Can you imagine the explosion of speculation? A senior Chinese bureaucrat on the cusp of a major elevation within the system had up and vanished! Was Qin Gang crazy enough to have suddenly defected? Now, what a tasty melon that would have been!

Unfortunately, for Qin Gang such speculation is about as useful as “observing the moon reflected in the water and flowers in the mirror” — it’s nothing more than a beguiling illusion. As they say, freedom is like the air we breathe, when you have it you’re not aware of it, but you gasp for it hungrily once it’s gone. Back in 2012, Wang Lijun came out of nowhere and was able to get himself into the American consulate in Chengdu. Then there were those rumors back in 2021 that Politburo member Wáng Qíshān 王岐山 had fled to the United States — but that was because people were wondering if Wang regretted not having defected when he had the opportunity in the past.

If Qin Gang had slipped away earlier this year, at least he would have had the freedom to enjoy all of the melon eating that his disappearance would have occasioned. Now, we’re the only ones who get to enjoy his melons.

Chinese text:

吃瓜奏鸣曲——“秦刚在哪里”

吴国光

Source: 吴国光, 吃瓜奏鸣曲——“秦刚在哪里”, 《美国之音》，2023年7月23日

夏天是吃瓜的季节。中共最近似乎有那么一点儿体恤民情的意思，配合今年这个极热的夏天，适时地给出了一个大瓜，几周来颇让全球舆论陷在吃瓜狂欢之中。

这个瓜的名字叫“秦刚失踪”。秦刚此人今年三月升任中国国务委员兼外交部长，一跃从驻美大使成为当今最为年轻的中共党和国家领导人。不过，就任新职三个月之后，本来几乎天天在媒体上出现的秦刚自6月25日起却忽然不见了。这未免引起一些猜测，但大瓜是7月11日上市的。那一天，中国外交部发言人宣称秦刚因“健康原因”将缺席即将在印尼举行的东盟会议，改由中共中央外事办公室主任、上一任外交部长王毅代打。悠忽这又过去了两周的时间，秦刚仍未露面，全球媒体争相追问“秦刚在哪里”的热潮还在延续。

秦刚在哪里？第一个答案是中共官方早先给出的，说是“健康原因”，那就算是“在医院“吧。相应地，有传言说秦刚得了新冠云云。不过，在中共那里，“健康”这个词的使用方法实在是太不健康了，那就是个烂筐子，什么东西都可以往里装。难怪人们对这个答案高度存疑。果然，几天之后，连说过这话的中国外交官们也懒得再去重复这个答案了，摆明了：秦刚就算在医院，那也不是因为“健康原因”。

也是从中国外交部的圈子里，迅即传出了第二个答案：秦刚因婚外情并有私生子而被中共官方审查。可是，这个答案也缺少说服力。谁都知道，婚外情、私生子这类事，在中共官员当中还真不是个事儿，倒不如说是蔚为风尚；没有因为这事儿被查的中共官员，只有中共借口这事儿要查的官员。

那么，秦刚是不是因为别的事儿被查，中共不过借口他的花花事儿呢？于是乎，第二个答案有了补充版，说秦刚的情妇是双面间谍。哈哈，这个瓜似乎最合乎观众胃口，简直超过了詹姆斯邦德007的故事：美女本是间谍，偏又做成了双料的，还降服了中共党国领导人中的明日之星，真该拍部大片滴！一时间，网路上有图片有视频，剑桥大学的冠名花园，华府楼顶的脉脉含情，吃瓜群众是不是大饱眼福呢？

剧情至此，有了点儿当年薄熙来王立军大剧的味道了。曾记否，那个剧本里也有英国间谍，也有美女主持，而美女主持也在西方过着所谓上流生活？那股子浓浓的乍富气息与满满的虚荣浮华，那种全球无边界的中共权贵与西方权贵沆瀣一气又尔虞我诈，不正是本世纪以来中国的主流追求吗？

然而，习近平上台十多年来，不是一直在打击权贵、对抗西方吗？怎么秦刚的故事依然是薄王翻版呢？于是乎又有了第三个答案，这回扯上了路线斗争：秦刚亲美，被中共的亲俄派向习近平告发了。当然，其中必有派系角力和权力斗争，你看前任外交部发言人赵什么的太太的幸灾乐祸即可知一二，再看现任中共驻美大使面对相关提问时那个乐呵劲儿也许就可知二三了。那么，反美的习近平半年多前为什么决意重用亲美的秦刚？要解答这个问题，又需要一波新的说法。据说，从秦刚的官场两面派手法，到秦刚夫人自制月饼的家常手艺，那都是高超滴。至于秦刚的家世背景，更是给他挂上了但凡能够找得到的秦姓高级中共官员的关系，只差没说他是秦始皇的七十几代孙了哈。

什么？秦始皇不姓秦啊？那没关系，李铁映也不姓秦，还不是被说成了秦刚的亲爹？如此种种，恐怕都算不上是“秦刚在哪里”的答案了。反正是吃瓜嘛，吃瓜的时候就是天南海北，东拉西扯，乐趣不也在这儿吗？你要追问为什么中共这次没有严密控制舆论，这就又多了一个问题。

秦刚不自由，秦刚想吃瓜

总之，议论纷纷，此处难以尽述。“健康论”不成立，“绯闻论”不到位，“斗争论”没揭锅，只要秦刚没露面，中共不官宣，还可以四论、五论、八论、十论下去，这个瓜有得吃了。俺不避跟风，也给一个明面上的答案，不过似乎也是一个还没有说到但应该说一说的答案。问的是：秦刚在哪里？我的答案是：秦刚在不自由的地方。

这个不自由的地方，可以具体到留置官员的某个宾馆乃至秦城的某间牢房，但也可以泛指中共官场乃至整个中国。在中国，民众不自由，人们对此深有体会。但是，这也往往造成了一种错觉，很多人总以为，自己如果进入了体制，爬上了高位，掌握了权力，那就有了自由。正是针对这一点，我要说的是：在这个不自由的地方，你有钱、有权、有地位，都仍然不自由。秦刚在今年6月25日之前固然比之后有所谓自由，但那种“自由”不过是生理意义上的自由，不是政治学意义上的自由。后者是在法律意义上和法律范围内可以决定自己行为的权利——这样的自由，你们中共官员有吗？

可悲的是，秦刚驻外多年，有在英国和美国不下十年的生活经历，应当知道一点儿自由的滋味，但是他仍然迷信权力所带来的那种假自由，不认识权利所产生的真自由。如今，在连那种权力所带来的假自由也消失了的处境中，不知道秦刚是不是在后悔：自己为什么不在当驻美大使的时候滞留西方呢？反正都是吃瓜，咱们也不妨帮秦刚这么狂想一下：今年新年伊始，秦刚离任驻美大使的前夜，在美国华府突然失踪了！明明知道回到北京就要官升三级，大得重用，这秦刚他到哪里去了呢？这个时候居然“叛逃”，秦刚疯了吗？

哇，这个瓜更大！可惜，对秦刚来说，这已经是水中月镜中瓜了。有道是，自由就像空气，有它的时候你不感觉到，没它的时候你找不回来它了。王立军毕竟是草莽起家，当年居然闯了一回美国领事馆；网络几度传言王岐山从中国跑了，那是因为有人替他惋惜当年也许能跑的时候却没有跑。如果年初秦刚跑了，他还会和咱们一起看关于他自己的新闻吃他自己的瓜呢。如今呢，只剩咱们吃瓜了。