China Detains Senior Diplomat Who Aided U.S. Relations

Liu Jianchao received a warm reception during a visit to Washington and New York where he was seen as a potential foreign minister.

Liu Jianchao, a senior Chinese diplomat widely seen as a potential foreign minister, has been taken away by authorities for questioning, according to people familiar with the matter.

Liu Jianchao speaking at a forum in Beijing in July.

A veteran of China’s foreign service who also fought corruption as a Communist Party graftbuster, Liu has most recently been serving as head of the party’s International Department, which oversees relations with foreign political parties and socialist states.

Liu was taken away after returning to Beijing in late July from a work trip overseas, according to the people familiar with the matter. The reason for his detention couldn’t be determined.

Liu, 61 years old, couldn’t be reached for comment. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The International Department and the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, its top internal watchdog, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Liu’s most recent public engagements were visits to Singapore, South Africa and Algeria late last month in his capacity as head of the International Department, according to official disclosures. The department’s website continues to list Liu as its minister.

His absence could erode diplomatic expertise in Beijing, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping has increasingly favored political loyalty in personnel appointments, according to people close to China’s foreign-policy establishment.

The detention of Liu marks the highest-level known probe involving a Chinese diplomat since Beijing ousted Qin Gang as foreign minister in 2023 after giving him the job just seven months earlier. An internal party investigation found that Qin had engaged in an extramarital affair that lasted through his tenure as Beijing’s ambassador to Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Qin was succeeded as foreign minister by his predecessor, Wang Yi, who is also the Communist Party’s top foreign-policy official and a member of the elite 24-member Politburo. Qin resigned from the party’s Central Committee last year, but remained a party member.

Party enforcers have taken down scores of senior officials as part of Xi’s relentless disciplinary purges, which have featured heightened scrutiny on party and state workers over national-security concerns. Since Xi took power in 2012, party inspectors have punished more than 6.2 million people for offenses that include corruption, bureaucratic inaction and the leaking of state secrets.

After Qin’s removal, Liu was considered a strong candidate to step up as foreign minister, given his experience and seniority within China’s diplomatic apparatus.

During a trip to Washington and New York in early 2024, Liu drew praise for his engaging delivery of messages on the need for steady U.S.-China relations, according to people who attended meetings with him at the time. Some American participants noted Liu’s willingness to both listen to and address concerns over China’s policies, including a clampdown on Western firms assessing investment risks in the country.

During that trip, Liu interacted with American think tanks such as the Asia Society, investors such as Blackstone Chief Executive Stephen Schwarzman and Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, as well as Biden administration officials, including then Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“The Chinese were basically telling us that he’s going to be the next foreign minister,” a U.S. official said at the time. “They were saying, ‘He’s going on to bigger things.’ ”

But the same trip raised eyebrows back in Beijing, where it would have been seen as politically incorrect for Liu to present himself as the foreign-minister-in-waiting before any formal announcement that he would be taking that role.

Liu has spent the bulk of his career in the foreign service, with notable stints in party and state agencies that spearheaded Xi’s crackdown on corruption.

People who have met Liu say he once professed a passion for golf and used to play often, but likely stopped as the party started frowning upon officials golfing amid Xi’s clampdown on extravagant behavior. Liu’s son was working in the finance industry in the U.S. at one point and is now based in China, according to some of these people.

A fluent English speaker, Liu joined China’s Communist Party and the Foreign Ministry in the 1980s, when he also spent time studying international relations at Oxford University. He gained prominence in the public eye as a ministry spokesman—a post he held during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

China subsequently appointed him as its ambassador to the Philippines and then Indonesia, before promoting him to assistant minister of foreign affairs in 2013.

Liu made an unusual switch to anticorruption work in 2015, when he was assigned to lead the international-cooperation office at the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. He became a key figure in Xi’s Operation Fox Hunt, a global effort to hunt down Chinese fugitives accused of graft who had fled abroad.

In 2017, Liu helped pilot a new government antigraft agency—known as a supervisory commission—in the eastern province of Zhejiang, where he was named the region’s top discipline enforcer. The agency was established at the national level the following year, with a mandate to police conduct and enforce party-style discipline among all government workers.

Liu returned to the foreign service in 2018, when he became a senior official at the party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission, a Xi-led body that directs China’s diplomatic policy.

In 2022, the party appointed Liu as head of the International Department and then promoted him to full membership of its elite Central Committee. He has traveled more often than his predecessor did, including trips to the U.S. and other Western democracies that past International Department chiefs generally hadn’t visited.

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com and Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com