Why China feels particular global pressure over balloongate
Tom Rogan
China has much to feel awkward about in its international dealings. Issues that attract common international ire include Beijing’s bullying of Taiwan, its imperial claims over the South China Sea, its global espionage, its trade manipulation, its mix of repressive and genocidal domestic policies, its debt diplomacy, and its gutting of fishing habitats.
Still, for two reasons, the fallout over its spy balloons is particularly uncomfortable for Beijing.
First, the balloons carry a visible physical threat that fits perfectly with the worst international perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party. The large, ominous, and largely covert balloons linger above us. Sometimes, they are seen. Sometimes, they are not. Their purpose, though well-understood by intelligence services, is unknown to most civilians. The balloons thus seem to threaten the privacy and security of everyone and everything, not simply the targets they monitor. They seem, in this sense, to be floating Big Brothers a la George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Second, the balloons have fundamentally undercut Xi Jinping’s central foreign policy narrative. Namely, the Chinese leader’s favorite assertion that Beijing seeks “only win-win cooperation” with the international community. Chinese officials claim relentlessly that all they want from the world is cooperation and a respect for internal affairs and sovereignty. (China struggles to explain how its sacrosanct support for sovereignty can co-exist with its support for Russia’s war against Ukrainian sovereignty.) Yet, now that the U.S. is providing dozens of other nations with evidence that China’s balloons have been breaching their own sovereignty, China is under great pressure. By the vast scale and shameless nature of its balloon antics, China seems to have extended its hostility toward the U.S. onto the rest of the world. Its “win-win” rhetoric rings rather hollow.
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China doesn’t quite know what to do about this public relations disaster. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman evinced as much on Wednesday. Insisting that the U.S. flight was purely “unintended, unexpected and isolated,” Wang Wenbin lashed out at Japan for concern over balloon flights over its own territory. Japan, Wang said, “without any solid evidence, has made unfounded allegations to smear and attack China.”
The problem for Wang and his masters is that the balloon program, rather than being an “isolated” concern, now fits a pattern. For instance, Wang was also asked on Wednesday about the summoning of the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines this week. That summoning follows a Chinese coast guard vessel’s shining of lasers at the crew of a Philippine vessel operating within the Philippines’s exclusive economic zone. Declaring without cause that China has “indisputable sovereignty” over the waters, Wang claimed that the laser pointing was legitimate and that the “Philippine side has learned what actually happened.”
This arrogant lack of contrition isn’t a good look for Beijing, but especially so now that the balloons have so publicly unveiled China’s disdain for other countries’ sovereignty.
The bottom line is that the balloons have delivered a death blow to China’s foreign policy credibility. For nations the world over, the reliability of Beijing’s word and the true nature of its agenda now merit harsher scrutiny.