Mr. Qin, 57, was appointed China’s ambassador to Washington in July 2021, and 17 months later was promoted to overseas minister, singling him out as a trusted protégé of Mr. Xi.
Earlier, Mr. Qin had served as a overseas ministry spokesman, a diplomat in London and as a protocol officer, a job that introduced him near Mr. Xi throughout overseas visits. Mr. Qin graduated from the University of International Relations, a college in Beijing linked to China’s safety service, and labored as an assistant within the Beijing bureau of United Press Worldwide earlier than becoming a member of the Ministry of International Affairs in 1992.
As a protocol officer for Mr. Xi, Mr. Qin was exhaustively punctilious, mentioned Pavel Slunkin, who was a Belarusian diplomat involved in arranging a visit by Mr. Xi to Belarus in 2015. Throughout the go to, Mr. Slunkin mentioned, Mr. Qin known as at round 2 a.m. and requested to instantly go to a museum that Mr. Xi was scheduled to go to, so Mr. Qin may recheck each element of the plans, together with precisely when music would strike up as Mr. Xi walked up some stairs.
“His subordinates and the embassy’s workers had been afraid to method him. So the communication with him was strictly hierarchical,” Mr. Slunkin, now a visiting fellow on the European Council on International Relations, mentioned of Mr. Qin in emailed solutions to questions. Mr. Qin, he mentioned, “clearly loved his particular place being near the physique — to Xi.”
As overseas minister since late 2022, Mr. Qin was on the forefront of efforts to tug China out of Covid-era diplomatic isolation, and to attempt to ease tensions with the US and different Western nations. However he was additionally a combative exponent of Mr. Xi’s imaginative and prescient of China as a assured world energy, impatient with criticisms from different governments, and infrequently missed a possibility to exalt Mr. Xi.
“The human race as soon as once more stands on the crossroads of historical past,” Mr. Qin told a news conference in Beijing in March. “President Xi Jinping has identified the fitting path for world governance from the excessive floor of the world, historical past and humankind.”