Chinese spy balloon: between appropriate toughness and dangerous confrontation Spanish director Carlos Saura dies at age 91

If an error can no longer be hidden, at least try to package it as inconspicuously as possible: governments around the world use this strategy. Also China. The regime usually decides with the greatest severity what its policies will and will not do. But then the United States discovered this balloon in its airspace, about 60 meters high and equipped with a technical substructure the size of several buses, according to the Pentagon.

It soon became clear that this balloon came from China. Also that he wasn’t an innocent weather balloon. But why was he hovering over American soil for so tantalizingly long, just before the first visit by a senior American official in years? After all, it was to be expected that an object of this size would not go unnoticed.

The response is self-explanatory: it “regrets” the invasion of US airspace, it said. Such tones are rarely heard from China. Apparently, the leadership in Beijing hoped not only to save the visit of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but also to capture the image that threatened to reveal itself to the world public: Is there chaos in Beijing? Does one agency not know what the other is doing – thereby making relations with the US even more difficult than the relations they already have?

Name and shame

Washington strives all the more for sovereignty and strength. Blinken’s visit was canceled and the balloon shot down: that was just the beginning. Since then, the US government has been publishing more and more findings about China’s large-scale espionage program.

Not only this one balloon would have carried technology that allows communication signals to be intercepted, among other things. But dozens of objects — including satellites — have flown over a total of 40 countries on five continents in recent years. The US is now gradually making public what would otherwise have been discussed behind closed doors. It’s called “name and disgrace”.

The message resonates a bit: We know exactly what you’re up to — maybe better than you do. President Joe Biden personally didn’t exactly bring it up subtly when he said in a televised interview this week with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping probably doesn’t want to be traded at this point, “The guy is in huge trouble.” The response was violent: Biden’s comment was “deeply irresponsible” and violated “fundamental diplomatic protocol,” according to a spokeswoman for the Chinese government.

Of course, Biden could count on his statement in Beijing to be taken as an additional provocation. But he seemed to accept that: the way China stands on this matter makes her outrage seem especially helpless. What the US president said in this interview probably has a domestic political background. In Washington, there is a race for the clearest advantage against China. Biden is constantly accused by Republicans — as well as some Democrats — of not acting hard enough.

Why not now?

Many Republicans criticized that the balloon should have been shot down over Alaska when it was first spotted in US airspace. It was a danger to both national security and the public to allow him to fly across the country for days on end.

The government has ruled out that the balloon could have collected sensitive information during this time; immediately on the ground additional protective measures were taken.

So it was the other way around: as long as the balloon was still flying, you could see it working, so to speak—how far it was controlled and where it stopped for supposed observation purposes. The pieces of debris now fished up from the Atlantic provide detailed information about the technology China uses in its surveillance operations.

The US government attaches great importance to the fact that the balloon launch is not an escalation, but there was no alternative in terms of security policy. But it is also staged to make it clear: we will defend ourselves with all determination. No American politician can afford a different impression right now, especially not Biden, for whom the rivalry with China is the most important foreign and security policy challenge of his tenure. “Before I took office, it was said that the People’s Republic of China was in power and that America was the world’s end,” the US president said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “No Longer Anymore!”

China on the defensive, the US on the (communicative) offensive: it is easy to forget that there may have been chaos and failures on the US side of the Pacific as well. Because even if it is known that both countries are spying on each other, how is it possible that such an extensive program of everything has gone unnoticed by the US for so long?

John Kirby, the White House spokesman responsible for national security, declined to comment on the scale of the Chinese operation when asked by Zeit Online.

Biden wants to respond faster than Trump

But what is known: During the Trump administration, balloons apparently entered US airspace several times, albeit for shorter periods of time. Only that should have been noticed later.

“I can confirm that we have not identified these threats. And that’s a gap that we need to fill,” he said recently General Glen Van Herck, who commands the North American Air Force. The latest Pentagon report on Chinese military activity makes no mention of spy balloons.

The Biden administration is now all the more determined to make good on these omissions. “We’ve improved our ability to see things the Trump administration couldn’t see,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s adviser on national security.

This, in turn, isn’t so much a dig at Trump and the Republicans as a signal of what to expect in the future. As Biden put it in his speech on Tuesday, “If China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country.” This also explains why the president on Friday ordered an unknown flying object to be shot down over Alaska.

Now the question is how close the ranks will close behind him on this one point on which Democrats and Republicans actually largely agree. At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Pentagon officials were put to the test by lawmakers from both parties. For them, the government raises more questions than it answers.

Mitt Romney, one of the Republicans closest to the center, said afterwards that he “believed that the administration, the president, our military and our intelligence agencies acted wisely and carefully.”

So far, he is the only one in his party to say so, even as Republicans in the House of Representatives unanimously supported a Democratic resolution condemning China’s actions. In the election campaign, which is about to begin, the subject is likely to be hotly debated – and also exploited by some.

Now on

The less the United States is concerned about a domestic dispute over China, the better. A Beijing regime cornered and exposed to the world public can temporarily satisfy its opponents. But concern is also growing in Washington: how do you get out of this situation? Especially since a basis for talks with China, which they wanted to keep despite everything, is apparently no longer wanted there: when Defense Minister Lloyd Austin recently tried to reach his Chinese counterpart, he would not have been available.

Dealing with this can be complicated. Especially if there are other incidents and the flying object shot down over Alaska also appears to come from China. The line between appropriate seriousness and potentially dangerous confrontation remains extremely narrow for the US government.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.