Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong’s sudden dismissal comes amid a wave of removals amid anticorruption campaign.
Published On 14 Apr 202614 Apr 2026
Senior Chinese diplomat Sun Weidong has been dismissed from his post as vice minister of foreign affairs, in the latest case of a high-ranking official being removed from office by Beijing.
The Ministry of Human Resources announced the news in a brief post on its website on Tuesday, citing a decision of the State Council, the highest body of state power in China.
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The post did not say why or when Sun had been dismissed, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website shows his last public engagements were meetings with the ambassadors of Brunei and Malaysia to China on March 13.
Two days earlier, Sun had met Pakistan’s ambassador to China to discuss bilateral cooperation, according to a post on diplomat Khalil Hashmi’s X account.
Dismissals of this kind in the Chinese government usually indicate high-level disciplinary action and are often followed by news of an investigation.
Sun’s dismissal notice included the removal of another official, An Lusheng, from his post as deputy director of the National Railway Administration.
Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has carried out a wide-ranging anticorruption campaign targeting “tigers and flies”, meaning high- and low-ranking officials.
Last year, China investigated more than one million corruption cases and disciplined 938,000 people, according to its Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission.
The list of cases involving disciplinary action included 69 provincial or ministerial-level officials, 4,155 bureau-level officials, 35,000 county-level officials, and 125,000 township-level officials, according to the commission’s year-end report.
Senior Chinese military officials have also been caught up in Xi’s anticorruption campaign sweeps.
For the second year in a row, United States Vice President JD Vance has topped the straw poll at the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the biggest right-wing gatherings in the country.
The poll is a bellwether – albeit, not necessarily an accurate one – for who might ultimately become the Republican nominee for the next presidential race.
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During this year’s four-day conference, attendees were asked which candidate they would prefer at the top of the Republican Party ticket for the 2028 election.
The results were revealed on stage Saturday. Vance had swept up 53 percent of the votes cast by nearly 1,600 attendees.
But rising up the ranks was another senior official under US President Donald Trump: his top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A former senator from Florida, Rubio notched 35 percent of the vote.
It was a markedly improved standing for Rubio, who tied for fourth place at last year’s CPAC straw poll.
That poll, taken within weeks of Trump starting his second term, showed Vance with 61 percent support, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon with 12 percent, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with 7 percent. Rubio and Representative Elise Stefanik both earned 3 percent.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press following a G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting on March 27, 2026 [AFP]
Attendance at CPAC, an annual conference, tends to skew away from the political centre and farther to the right.
Speakers at this year’s conference included Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi, and Eduardo and Flavio Bolsonaro, the sons of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who was imprisoned last September for attempting to subvert his country’s democracy.
But this year’s straw poll comes at a critical time for the Republican Party.
Less than eight months remain until November’s midterm elections in the US, and Republicans are hoping to defend their congressional majorities at the ballot box.
Trump, long the standard-bearer for his party, has seen his approval numbers sink since his return to office in 2025. Earlier this week, a survey from the news agency Reuters and the research firm Ipsos found that only 36 percent of US citizens approved of his job performance, a new low.
The ongoing war in Iran and economic frustrations, including rising gas prices linked to the conflict, are among the factors contributing to the slump.
While Trump has teased he may seek a third term, US law prevents modern presidents from serving more than two. His second presidency is set to expire in 2028.
That leaves an open question as to who may succeed the 79-year-old Republican.
Vance, a veteran and former single-term senator from Ohio, is seen to represent a more isolationist branch of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base. He has generally been opposed to US involvement in foreign conflicts, though he has defended Trump’s decision to join Israel in joint strikes on Iran.
Rubio, meanwhile, has a longer political resume than Vance and is seen to be more hawkish towards regime change, particularly in his family’s ancestral home of Cuba. He served as a senator for Florida from 2011 until his unanimous confirmation as secretary of state in 2025.
Both men had been critical of Trump before joining his administration. Vance once called Trump “unfit” for office, and Rubio derided Trump as a “con artist” and an “embarrassment” when he was a rival candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Senator Ted Cruz speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 28 [Gabriela Passos/AP Photo]
CPAC tends not to survey participants about who should be president when a Republican is already in the Oval Office.
But the straw polls it held before and after Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, have shown a noticeable realignment in the Republican Party.
In the decade leading up to the 2016 election – Trump’s first successful campaign for office – moderate Republican Mitt Romney and libertarian Rand Paul consistently topped the CPAC straw polls.
Ever since his first term, however, Trump has trounced the competition.
Despite his 2020 election defeat, he still topped the straw poll in 2021, with 55 percent support, and his numbers climbed each successive year, through to his re-election in 2024.
Experts have noted that the Republican Party has largely consolidated around Trump’s politics, with the few remaining moderate and critical voices increasingly marginalised.
The CPAC straw poll, however, is not always accurate. Ahead of Trump’s victory in 2016, the majority of straw poll participants backed Senator Cruz of Texas to be the next president. Trump came in third place with 15 percent support, trailing Rubio at 30 percent.
South Korea Prime Minister Kim Min-seok (L) with US Vice President JD Vance ahead of their talks at the White House in Washington DC, USA, 12 March 2026. Courtesy of the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the United States
March 13 (Asia Today) — South Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-seok met U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House in Washington on Wednesday to discuss bilateral investment, trade issues and developments on the Korean Peninsula.
The meeting came about 50 days after the two leaders first met during Kim’s visit to Washington in January.
Kim highlighted the passage of a special law supporting South Korean investment in the United States, which cleared the National Assembly earlier this week.
He said the legislation demonstrates Seoul’s commitment to implementing bilateral investment agreements and could contribute to revitalizing U.S. manufacturing and job creation.
Kim added that the measure could also accelerate implementation of agreements outlined in a joint fact sheet between the two countries, including cooperation in areas such as nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear energy and shipbuilding.
Vance welcomed the legislation, saying it provides a legal foundation for implementing investment agreements between the two countries, according to South Korea’s Prime Minister’s Office.
The two sides also discussed cooperation in critical minerals and issues related to non-tariff trade barriers.
Kim explained Seoul’s recent decision to allow U.S. companies to export mapping data from South Korea, describing it as a forward-looking step aimed at strengthening cooperation.
Vance praised the move and said the two countries should continue consultations on non-tariff trade barriers.
Kim also said issues previously raised by Vance during their January meeting – including concerns related to the e-commerce company Coupang and certain religious matters – are now being handled in a stable manner.
Vance said the United States respects South Korea’s domestic legal framework and thanked Seoul for continuing to communicate with Washington on issues of interest to the United States.
The leaders also exchanged views on the Korean Peninsula and reaffirmed that the door remains open for dialogue with North Korea.
They agreed to maintain close coordination on developments related to the peninsula.
South Korea’s Prime Minister’s Office said the meeting helped deepen personal trust between Kim and Vance and is expected to strengthen communication on key bilateral issues.
The office’s statement did not mention whether the two discussed the Section 301 trade investigation launched this week by the Office of the United States Trade Representative targeting several major trading partners, including South Korea.
However, the issue of non-tariff barriers raised during the meeting could be related to that investigation.
Reporting from El Progreso, Honduras — Not long after Jesuit priest Jack Warner met a bearded, 22-year-old Midwesterner in 1980, the two Americans bonded, drawn together by the goals and questions that led them both to El Progreso, a small city not far from vast banana fields — the campos bananeros.
Warner was 35 and had arrived a year earlier to form the Teatro La Fragua, a theater company for Hondurans. As the young priest looked to forge a relationship with the campesinos, his friendship blossomed with Tim Kaine, who had taken a year off from Harvard Law School to join the Jesuit mission.
“He was 22 years old,” Warner said, “and it was the typical thing that a 22-year-old would do: What do I do with my life?”
Kaine, now a 58-year-old U.S. senator from Virginia and the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has often said that his time in Honduras helped him answer that question, giving him “a North Star” to guide his life toward public service. It’s central to his biography and likely to arise Tuesday night when he debates his Republican opponent, Mike Pence.
When Kaine traveled to Honduras, the nation was in the throes of turmoil, flanked by countries torn by civil war and ruled by the heavy hand of a U.S-backed military bent on stamping out what it perceived to be communism spreading in the region.
“I got a firsthand look at a system — a dictatorship — where a few people at the top had all the power and everyone else got left out,” Kaine said in July at the Democratic National Convention.
He also witnessed extreme poverty. His experiences, coupled with the Jesuit goal of being “men for others,” led him to become a civil-rights lawyer for 17 years, specializing in housing-discrimination cases. Honduras convinced him, he said, “that we’ve got to advance opportunity for everyone.”
Kaine now serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and this year co-sponsored a bill that would increase aid to Central America’s “Northern Triangle” — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Key to his experiences in Honduras was the friendship and example of Warner and a handful of other Jesuits. And a Christmastime visit to a poor man’s house taught him a lesson that resonates decades later.
During his time in El Progreso, Kaine lived in a barracks, along with Warner and other Jesuits. After their work days wrapped up about 5 p.m., he and Warner frequently commiserated over office duties, students, the teatro and the poetry Kaine was writing. Warner, a former English teacher, worked with Kaine on his verse. Over time, they became confidants.
Father Jack Warner admires a painting created by an actor who performs in the Teatro la Fragua in El Progreso, Honduras.
(Veronica Rocha / Los Angeles Times )
Both men grew up in the Midwest — Kaine in the Kansas City, Kan., suburb of Overland Park; Warner in St. Louis — and had been drawn to the Jesuit mission of social justice from an early age.
Kaine attended Rockhurst High School for boys, run by Jesuit priests who ran a demanding schedule of daily Masses, theology classes and community service activities with retreats.
Kaine, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Missouri, was at Harvard Law when he began to question his faith and the path he should take in life, he says. Because he had made a brief trip to Honduras in 1974 to deliver donations to the Jesuits, he decided to write them and see whether they could use some help. They said yes.
“He took a rather strong decision to seek out an answer — not everyone comes to Progreso,” Warner said.
Kaine had to tell his law school dean, and his parents, of this new direction. “The dean, not to mention my parents and friends, were confused about what I was doing and even questioned whether I would come back,” Kaine once recalled in a Virginia Tech speech.
By September 1980, Kaine was rumbling along in a bus into northern Nicaragua, where he visited another American Jesuit, Father James Carney. In Honduras months earlier, Carney had encouraged peasants to fight for their land, and he was expelled by the Honduran military, which saw him as one of the leftist priests who embraced liberation theology and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.
Activists, some of them priests or the peasants they worked with, would be banished or killed by authorities. Carney would later disappear in what was believed to be a clandestine Honduran military operation backed by the CIA.
“It was a time when anytime the police stopped you, you got really nervous. You never knew what was going to happen,” Warner recalled. “We were under a military dictatorship at the time and very heavy military control. It was scary, and one had to live very carefully.”
We were under a military dictatorship at the time and very heavy military control. It was scary, and one had to live very carefully.
— Father Jack Warner, on Honduras in the 1980s
In El Progreso that September, Kaine soon met another Jesuit, Brother James O’Leary, a missionary also from Missouri.
O’Leary, who died in 2002, was often described as an outspoken, occasionally cranky but also skilled carpenter, painter and electrician who built houses and chapels for the poor. Kaine worked with him at his Loyola Technical Vocational Center, helping to boost the school’s enrollment and teaching carpentry and welding. As a youngster, Kaine had picked up skills working in his father’s ironworking shop in the Kansas City area.
Kaine declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he recalled what O’Leary taught him.
“I learned from a great mentor there, Brother Jim O’Leary, that faith is about more than words or doctrine — it’s about action,” he said. “And that led me to spend my life in public service.”
One of Kaine’s former students at the vocational center, Alex Hernandez Monroy, recalled the daily lessons in carpentry and welding from the shaggy-haired young American.
“His Spanish wasn’t very good, but despite all that he interacted with us,” said Hernandez Monroy, then 13 and now 48. Although Kaine couldn’t pronounce certain words, the students appreciated his efforts.
“Something very important that he did was that he visited the families of the students,” he said. “We were not used to interacting with Americans, so it had an impression on us to see someone like him educating us.”
Using some of the skills he learned from Kaine and O’Leary, Hernandez Monroy teaches carpentry to a group of 15 students at the school. “They taught us that we could help our kids,” he said. “The majority of our youth are at risk, so that left an impression on us.”
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About 35,000 people lived in El Progreso in 1980, when it was dominated by the presence of the United Fruit Co., the world’s largest — and often exploitative — banana company. Today it has a population of about 200,000, and the winding roads leading to the city are lined by brightly colored, one-story concrete homes.
During Kaine’s time there, however, it was a collection of dusty, rural villages and banana camps, with mountaintop towns accessible only by foot or mule. As a center for union activity, it became a target of the communism-fearing Reagan administration.
While war raged in neighboring El Salvador and Nicaragua, Honduras remained calm — but was gripped in fear. It was the staging ground for many of the United States’ clandestine operations aimed at toppling other governments.
People dared not speak about activism or union organizing lest they risk being among those who “disappeared.” More than a dozen priests were killed in the 1970s and 1980s after being associated with liberation theology, considered a Marxist-tinged doctrine that preached to the poor.
While Catholic priests in Central America were attacked for advocating on behalf of the poor, Kaine maintained a low profile and didn’t attract notice from the military.
Warner, a slender man with gray shoulder-length hair, recalled Kaine’s time in Honduras during a recent interview at the theater in El Progreso.
“His interest was in the students and what he was doing in his work, which is what we were all doing,” Warner said. “Trying to figure how we can do the work without being kicked out of the country for exploring it.”
Kaine also saw poverty and expressed his feelings about it through writing, as did Warner.
The priest maintained a daily newsletter with accounts of poverty and life in El Progreso. “We all have our defenses to shut out the existence of human misery, most of which consist of closing our eyes and pretending it doesn’t exist,” Warner wrote in a December 1980 newsletter. “Hopelessness then becomes a way of life for both parties.”
Warner published one of Kaine’s poems, titled “Still Life,” in which he described the “thick misery” of the town of San Pedro Sula. “In the saddest slum of San Pedro, lives are played out in the shade of a highway where buses glide like lost thoughts overhead.”
He likened the challenges, or “questions marks” facing the town to fingers testing the wind. “Each predicts change that just won’t come.”
Kaine spent nine months in El Progreso before returning to Harvard. He has kept in occasional touch with Warner and has returned to Honduras several times, most recently last year. This year, he and 25 senators called for an end to immigration raids in the U.S. targeting women and children who were fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
When he accepted the nomination for vice president, Kaine said that the three basic values he absorbed in Honduras hold true today: “Fe, familia y trabajo.” Faith, family and work.
Students take a break before heading to class to learn carpentry at Loyola Technical Vocational Center, where Tim Kaine volunteered, in El Progreso, Honduras.
(Veronica Rocha / Los Angeles Times )
“I came to understand the power of faith and communal worship,” Kaine said at Virginia Tech in 2006. “I learned how to speak Spanish and began to understand how the things which can seem to divide us — like language and skin color — were so much smaller than the dreams and fears that unite us.”
Kaine also has repeatedly recalled what became one of his most indelible memories of Honduras.
He and Father Jarrell Wade, a Jesuit known as Father Patricio, had traveled by mule to visit a dirt-poor family around Christmas. As they prepared to leave, the husband handed Wade a bag. “Merry Christmas, padre,” he said.
Inside the worn bag were fruits and vegetables he had saved for the priest. Wade took the bag and thanked him.
Kaine was appalled and angered that the priest would take food from such a poor family — “I was fuming” — until Wade imparted the lesson: “You must be really humble to accept a gift of food from a poor person, and the most important thing in life is the ability to give.”
