Furor Over Chinese Spy Balloon Leads to a Diplomatic Crisis

 

Furor Over Chinese Spy Balloon Leads to a Diplomatic Crisis

 

The Pentagon called the object, which has flown from Montana to Kansas, an “intelligence-gathering” balloon. Beijing said it was used mainly for weather research and had strayed off course.

 

Edward Wong Helene Cooper Chris Buckley

By Edward Wong, Helene Cooper and Chris Buckley

Feb. 3, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/world/asia/china-spy-balloon.html

 

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Friday canceled a weekend trip to Beijing after a Chinese spy balloon was sighted above the Rocky Mountain state of Montana, igniting a frenzy of media coverage and political commentary over a machine that the Pentagon said posed no threat to the United States.

 

Mr. Blinken called the Chinese surveillance an “irresponsible act” and a “clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law.”

 

China’s “decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have,” he said at a news conference on Friday afternoon.

 

Mr. Blinken canceled the trip after civilians in Montana this week began spotting the balloon, which the Pentagon said was an “intelligence-gathering” airship. Military officials had been monitoring the balloon for days, and Mr. Blinken and a deputy secretly confronted Chinese diplomats in Washington on Wednesday. But it became a diplomatic crisis only as media attention mounted on Thursday night and Republican politicians called for President Biden and Mr. Blinken to act.

 

The balloon’s presence and Mr. Blinken’s announcement added to the rising tensions between the two superpowers. The situation also underscored the sensitive politics in the United States as both Democratic and Republican leaders vie to be seen as sufficiently hawkish on China.

 

Mr. Blinken had planned to leave Friday night for the trip, the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state to China since 2018. He had been expected to meet with President Xi Jinping and discuss a wide range of issues. But Mr. Blinken said he called Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, on Friday and said he was postponing his trip because of the balloon.

 

Mr. Blinken said he told Mr. Wang he would visit China “when conditions allow.”

 

Mr. Wang told Mr. Blinken in a phone call late on Friday that “China is a responsible country and has always strictly abided by international law,” the Chinese foreign ministry said on its website.

 

The brief Chinese summary of their call did not mention the balloon or Mr. Blinken’s cancellation of his trip, but suggested China’s leaders believed the Biden administration had blown the incident out of proportion. Mr. Wang, the summary said, urged that both sides must “avoid misjudgments, and manage and control their disagreements.”

 

Some Republican lawmakers criticized Mr. Biden on Thursday for allowing the balloon to drift for days over the United States and not taking harsher measures against China. White House officials said such balloons have appeared over U.S. territory before, including during the Trump administration.

 

By midday on Friday, the balloon had reached Kansas, where it was sometimes hovering and sometimes moving at speeds of up to 70 miles an hour, Pentagon officials said. The United States was using its own surveillance methods to monitor and study the machine, including deploying aircraft.

 

Mr. Biden may yet decide to shoot it down, a Pentagon official said, but he will likely not do so until the balloon is above water, probably over the Atlantic Ocean, given the southeasterly direction it has been heading.

 

“Right now, we assess that there is no threat, no physical threat or military threat, to people on the ground,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said Friday. Later Friday, General Ryder said the military had also assessed another balloon reportedly crossing Latin America as another Chinese surveillance device.

 

Mr. Blinken and Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, spoke with the Chinese Embassy on Wednesday night about the balloon over the United States, and American diplomats in Beijing confronted Chinese officials there, State Department officials said. They and Pentagon officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities over the balloon.

 

Pentagon officials said that while other surveillance balloons have hovered over the United States in recent years, this one has lingered longer than any of the previous ones.

 

The Chinese government expressed its regret over the incident on Friday and asserted that the balloon was for civilian research and had “deviated far from its planned course.” The statement appeared to be an effort to keep Mr. Blinken’s visit on track.

 

Chinese officials had been anticipating the visit as an important moment to mark China’s reopening to the world after Mr. Xi decided in December to end his “zero Covid” policy, which had led to protests last fall and worsened an economic slowdown. Planning for the trip began after Mr. Xi met with Mr. Biden on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November.

 

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have adopted a combative stance toward China, saying that the Chinese Communist Party is intent on undermining the U.S.-led world order. Mr. Biden has greatly expanded efforts to hobble China’s technological advancements. And he has worked with allies and partners across Asia, including with Taiwan, the de facto independent island that China claims, to bolster military forces in the event of an armed conflict with China.

 

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in Manila that the U.S. military would begin using as many as nine bases across the Philippines for temporary housing of troops and equipment, a move aimed at deterring China from trying to invade Taiwan or take further military action in the South China Sea.

 

Biden administration officials are sensitive to any suggestions that they are not taking a hard line against China. But Mr. Blinken insisted on Friday that national security concerns and not domestic politics were the reasons behind his decision to cancel the trip.

 

Republican officials laid out various demands of Mr. Blinken after news of the balloon emerged on Thursday.

 

A post on the official Twitter account of Republican lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said it was “imperative” that Mr. Blinken tell Mr. Xi and his government that “their military adventurism will no longer be tolerated.” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, wrote online that Mr. Blinken should cancel his trip.

 

Mr. Biden is scheduled to give his annual State of the Union speech in Congress on Tuesday.

 

Jessica Chen Weiss, a political scientist at Cornell University who recently worked in the State Department on China policy, said the decision to cancel Mr. Blinken’s trip “reflects the unfortunate triumph of symbolism over substance.”

 

“It also confirms the low expectations going into the trip, that the potential upside should have been so outweighed by the domestic political risks of visiting Beijing amid congressional outrage,” she said.

 

Daniel Russel, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific and a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said “the administration clearly was dissatisfied with the Chinese government’s public expression of regret — perhaps because Beijing insisted on hiding behind the laughable alibi that this was a weather balloon blown off course.”

 

“This incident has soured the atmosphere and hardened positions, and there’s no guarantee the two sides can successfully resurrect the Bali momentum,” he added.

 

The explanation from the Chinese Foreign Ministry came after Pentagon officials said Thursday that they had detected a balloon, “most certainly launched by the People’s Republic of China,” over Montana, which is home to about 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos.

 

After initially telling reporters it had to check on the claims about the balloon, the ministry said late Friday in Beijing that the balloon’s course was an accident.

 

“The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” an unidentified spokesperson for the ministry said in a statement on its website. “Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into U.S. airspace due to force majeure.”

 

“Force majeure” refers to a violation caused by forces beyond a party’s control.

 

The ministry said it would talk with U.S. officials about how to “properly handle this unexpected situation.”

 

“It’s a plausible explanation, but it’s preposterous that they didn’t guess it would end up in North America,” said Lynn McMurdie, a professor in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, who had modeled the balloon’s flight path.

 

“With the weather pattern right now, we have quite a strong jet across the Pacific, and something that originates in China would end up in Montana,” she added. “Why wouldn’t they know that it would end up here?”

 

Ross Hays, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, who had also carried out his own analysis, said it was very probable, based on current weather patterns, that a balloon from China would end up over Montana.

 

Canada said Thursday that it had also detected the balloon and was tracking a “potential second incident.”

 

The Pentagon has refused to disclose many details about the balloon, including its size and features, making it hard for outside experts to assess its intent and value. “We did assess that it was large enough to cause damage from the debris field if we downed it over an area,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters.

 

U.S. officials say Chinese spy balloons have crossed over into American airspace in the past, and have been classified as unidentified aerial phenomena, the same category that the Pentagon uses for U.F.O.s.

 

Another U.S. official said intelligence agencies began tracking the balloon several days ago, not long after it had left China and began its controlled drift toward the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The official said American trackers continued to monitor the balloon as it progressed through Canada toward the continental United States, and were surprised when it crossed over into American airspace.

 

The balloon, which is sometimes hovering and sometimes moving at around 60,000 feet above the ground, has solar panels that officials think power its propulsion. It is also outfitted with cameras and other surveillance equipment.

 

General Ryder called the balloon “maneuverable,” but declined to explicitly say that China was still operating the balloon.

 

“We assess that it will probably be over the United States for a few days,” he said.

 

The once-humble balloon is one of many technologies that China’s military forces have seized on as a potential tool in their competition with the United States and other powers.

 

In studies and newspaper articles, People’s Liberation Army experts have tracked efforts by the United States, France and other countries to use advanced high-altitude balloons for intelligence collection and for coordinating battlefield operations. New materials and technologies, they have said, have made balloons more resilient, maneuverable and far-ranging.

 

“Technological advances have opened a new door for the use of balloons,” one article in the Liberation Army Daily — the main newspaper of China’s military — stated last year. Another article in the same newspaper noted that airships in the upper atmosphere could also become like “a thousand eyes” helping to monitor outer space.

 

Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington, Euan Ward from London and Amy Chang Chien from Taipei.

 

A correction was made on Feb. 3, 2023: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the title of Wang Yi. He is the Chinese Communist Party’s top foreign policy official, not China’s foreign minister.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

 

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 22 years, based in New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton and U.C. Berkeley. @ewong

 

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent, and was part of the team awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, for its coverage of the Ebola epidemic. @helenecooper

 

Chris Buckley is chief China correspondent and has lived in China for most of the past 30 years after growing up in Sydney, Australia. Before joining The Times in 2012, he was a correspondent in Beijing for Reuters. @ChuBailiang