In 1988, young Comrade Qin Gang (秦剛) did not graduate from the China Foreign Affairs University (外交學院), China’s training academy for diplomats. He never attended the Institute. Instead, he graduated from Beijing’s “University of International Relations” (國際關係學院) which, as I recall from early in my diplomatic career, was a campus well-known for its affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party Center’s intelligence services. In 1964, because of the school’s critical status as a training ground for special operatives, the UIR was named a “key institute of higher learning” (重點高校) — together with elite Beijing and Tsinghua universities — as an academy of surpassing importance to the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives.
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