This Thursday’s announcement (2) that an alleged Chinese spy balloon was flying over US territory had wide repercussions in Washington, where Republican lawmakers charged the president, Joe Biden, for a stricter position in relation to the regime led by Xi Jinping.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy described the balloon as an example of “China’s brazen affront to American sovereignty,” an argument echoed by other lawmakers of the same party. Senator Tom Cotton asked Blinken to cancel his trip.
Senator Marco Rubio, who sits on the House intelligence committee, said the news was alarming but not a surprise. “The level of spying on our country by Beijing has intensified and become clearer over the past five years,” he said on Twitter.
When asked about the matter, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters that the regime is still investigating what happened.
However, he condemned what he called “lucubrations and rumors” about the incident, adding that his country obeys the laws of international law and “has no intention of violating the land or air borders of any sovereign State”. “We hope that both parties can deal with the matter calmly and prudently,” she added.
Meanwhile, Canada’s Ministry of Defense said it had also detected a spy balloon and was monitoring it to see if it represented a “second potential incident”, without clarifying whether the two cases were related.
The episode shook the already fragile relations between the two powers on the eve of a trip by Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, to Beijing, the first of its kind in six years.
The moment was already tense between the countries, with the leak of a US memo last week in which a general predicted a war between them in 2025.
In the American press, there is speculation whether the Pentagon’s own decision to release the information was not intended to serve as a kind of warning to Beijing. The revelation of the existence of the balloon was, after all, made by William Burns —director of the CIA, the American intelligence agency— during an event at Georgetown University, in Washington, when he described the Asian giant as the “greatest geopolitical challenge ” of the USA today.
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