In The Trial, one of Franz Kafka’s novels that was posthumously published (all his works were), the protagonist is inexplicably arrested, persecuted, and prosecuted by a totalitarian authority with no plausible reason in a paradigm of information void. The randomness is terrifying. What happens when Kafkaesque arbitrariness meets Orwellian dystopia? You get the Xi Jinping regime in China, the world’s second-most-powerful nation where a high-profile foreign minister suddenly ‘goes missing’, remains untraceable, and a month later the world is told that he has been removed from his job in a terse one-line statement. And while Qin Gang — who was...