BEIJING -- When a high-ranking official in China's public security system was elected president of Interpol in 2016, leaders in Beijing rejoiced. The promotion lent respectability to China's notoriously opaque and arbitrary criminal justice system.
But now that same official, Meng Hongwei, 64, has mysteriously disappeared, after recently returning to China. Even the country's most internationally prominent police officer, it seems, can vanish without an official murmur from Beijing.
No one yet knows where Meng is or why he suddenly disappeared, even though he leads an organization that serves as a kind of United Nations for the world's police forces.
His wife, who is living in France, where Interpol has its headquarters, reported him missing Thursday evening after she failed to hear from him upon his arrival in China. French authorities have opened an investigation.
Questions are already arising about whether Meng is under investigation by Chinese authorities, and whether he was snatched away by security agents without notice. If so, his sudden and mysterious disappearance threatens to cloud China's image, demonstrating that even the most prominent official of an international police organization is vulnerable
"If Meng Hongwei has disappeared in China, then of course the most likely reason is an anti-corruption investigation," Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a Communist Party journal who now writes commentaries on Chinese politics, said in a telephone interview.
"Internationally, he is president of Interpol, but in the eyes of the Chinese authorities he is first of all Chinese, and they wouldn't think too much about his international prominence," Deng added. "This is the new normal."
Chinese authorities had already sent an emphatic message earlier this week that international prominence was no shield for Chinese citizens. Two days before it became known that Meng had apparently disappeared, Chinese state media reported that Fan Binging, a Chinese actress who had disappeared for four months, had been cooperating with tax authorities, who fined her nearly $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.
Since President Xi Jinping became head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has demonstrated that no one, no matter how high ranking, is immune from accountability. This year, China established an anti-corruption investigation agency with wide powers to secretly detain officials suspected of wrongdoing.
Chinese officials under investigation often disappear for weeks or even months before the government says anything about their fate.
In France, investigators learned of Meng's disappearance when his wife went to police in Lyon on Thursday evening and explained that she not heard from her husband since his arrival in China, according to an official close to the investigation, who insisted on anonymity and was not authorized to comment publicly.
Meng's wife also told police that she had received threats by telephone and on social media, and French authorities have provided her with police protection, Agence France-Presse reported.
In a statement, Interpol, the main organization for global police cooperation, said that it was "aware of media reports in connection with the alleged disappearance" of Meng. "This is a matter for the relevant authorities in both France and China," the statement said.
After Meng was elected by Interpol's general assembly in 2016, he was celebrated by China's state-run news media. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said at the time that Meng's elevation had "received a positive response from the broad numbers of member countries" of Interpol.
Meng has remained a vice minister of China's Ministry of Public Security while he serves as president of Interpol, and a page describing his background and activities remained on the ministry's website Friday. China is in the middle of a weeklong National Day vacation, and calls to the ministry's media office Friday evening were not answered.
In April, the ministry disclosed that Meng was no longer a member of the Communist Party committee that oversees the ministry, a step that sparked speculation on overseas Chinese websites that he could be in trouble.
But official Chinese news media have not leveled any accusations against Meng, and as recently as August, he continued to receive official visitors in Beijing. After news of Meng's disappearance spread, The South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper published in Hong Kong, cited an unnamed source in reporting that he had been taken away after arriving in China and was under investigation.
A Section on 10/06/2018