China’s dumb spy balloon lie undercuts Beijing’s anti-American narrative
Joel Gehrke
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A salvage operation to recover China’s downed spy balloon sets the stage for a protracted diplomatic humiliation for the communist regime.
“They’ve caught China red-handed,” the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Cunningham told the Washington Examiner. “They have what they need to literally tell the world, ‘Look, we just caught China in a huge lie.’”
That rebuke offers more than just payback for President Joe Biden, who endured days of embarrassment as civilians from Montana to South Carolina watched the balloon make its slow course across American airspace. The tandem detection of a similar balloon in Latin American skies attests to what U.S. officials are characterizing as a wide-ranging surveillance program that Beijing has conducted without respect for sovereign airspace.
“There is an ongoing operation to recover the balloon’s components; we’re analyzing them to learn more about the surveillance program,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Wednesday. “We already shared information with dozens of countries around the world both from Washington and through our embassies. We’re doing so because the United States was not the only target of this broader program, which has violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents.”
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The controversy figures to reinforce U.S. efforts to coordinate a trans-Atlantic approach to competition with China, which will require overcoming Beijing’s economic influence in countries such as Germany and Hungary.
“The Chinese balloon over the United States confirms a pattern of Chinese behavior, where we see that China over the last years has invested heavily in new military capabilities, including different types of surveillance and intelligence platforms,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, in a joint press conference with Blinken. “We need to be aware of the constant risk of Chinese intelligence and then step up what we do to protect ourselves.”
China’s diplomatic corps mustered only a scant rebuttal on Wednesday to the briefings that U.S. officials have offered to foreign governments.
“It is hoped that the U.S. will communicate with other countries based on facts,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in a press briefing after denouncing Biden’s response to “the unintended entry of the unmanned Chinese civilian airship.”
Mao and her colleagues maintain that the balloon was “used for meteorological and other scientific research” rather than intelligence gathering and that it was blown off course “due to the influence of westerly winds.” Those defenses have drawn a scornful response from American observers.
“They claimed that it’s a weather balloon that went off course, yet they didn’t tell us that it was going off course until we discovered it,” retired Adm. Harry Harris, who served as U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 2018 to 2021, told the House Armed Services Committee in a Tuesday hearing. “It beggars the imagination what they’re saying over there.”
The unconvincing rhetoric raises the possibility that Chinese diplomats, at least, were blindsided by the intelligence operation.
“My best guess is that the foreign ministry was caught off guard when this happened, and this was the best they came up with in the heat of the moment and the need for responding quickly,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Mazza surmised. “I don’t think we should be surprised at China’s potential incompetence here. They’re not really any more competent than we are. We can be pretty incompetent when it comes to this stuff.”
Blinken evinced little interest in the question of which Chinese government agency or leader may have been involved in the program.
“The fact is, China engaged in this irresponsible action, in violation of our sovereignty and territorial integrity and international law,” Blinken told reporters. “And, as we’ve noted as well, we’re not alone in this. Countries across five continents have also had surveillance balloons overfly their territory, which is why we’re sharing this information with others.”
If Blinken’s message is effective, then Chinese officials may have stumbled into a controversy that weakens one of their core diplomatic narratives. In response to U.S. allegations that Beijing represents a threat to the “rules-based international order,” Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and other senior officials have claimed that they adhere to the international laws promulgated under the auspices of the United Nations.
“In a nutshell, China bids to reduce the US claim of ‘rules-based international order’ to an imperialist will intending to unilaterally impose rules made by a small number of countries,” a pair of scholars based in Hong Kong and Beijing wrote in a recent article for the Chinese Journal of Comparative Law. “In so doing, China aims to separate the ‘rules-based’ order from the prevailing international legal order embodied in the norms, principles, and institutions emancipated from the UN system, thus depriving the ‘rules-based’ order of its legitimacy in terms of international rule of law.”
That message is designed to resonate most with “the majority of the nations in international society who do not have a say in the rule-making process,” as the article put it. Yet the surveillance balloon controversy enabled Blinken to condemn Beijing for “violat[ing] international law and U.S. sovereignty” through the deployment of the balloon.
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“The audience that we really have to have in mind is these third countries, in particular in the developing world,” said Cunningham. “China has been bending over backwards to get developing states on its side … and [the United States can] turn around and say, ‘Oh, by the way, you know, that balloon that’s been flying over your country, or over your neighbor’s countries, that China said was just a weather balloon gone astray? That was a spy balloon. We have one of them. Check this out.”