China: US balloons flew in airspace
White House defends decision to shoot down 3 unidentified objects
– China on Monday said more than 10 U.S. high-altitude balloons have flown in its airspace during the past year without its permission, following Washington’s accusation that Beijing operates a fleet of surveillance balloons around the world. The United States denied that it operates any surveillance balloons over China.
The Chinese allegation came after the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had crossed from Alaska to South Carolina, sparking a new crisis in bilateral relations that have spiraled to their lowest level in decades.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin gave no details about the alleged U.S. balloons, how they had been dealt with or whether they had government or military links.
“It is also common for U.S. balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries,” Wang said at a daily briefing. “Since last year, U.S. high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of Chinese authorities.”
Wang said the U.S. should “first reflect on itself and change course, rather than smear and instigate a confrontation.”
China says the balloon shot down by the U.S. was an unmanned airship made for meteorological research that had been blown off course. It has accused the U.S. of overreacting by shooting it down and threatened to take unspecified action in response.
In Washington, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said Monday that any claim that the U.S. government operates surveillance balloons over China is false.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, connected to the People’s Liberation Army, that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the United States and over 40 countries across five
continents,” Watson said.
“This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control. It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the United States was a weather balloon and to this day has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace and the airspace of others.”
Following the balloon incident, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a visit to Beijing that many had hoped would put the brakes on the sharp decline in relations over Taiwan, trade, human rights and threatening Chinese actions in the disputed South China Sea.
Also Monday, the Philippines accused a Chinese coast guard ship of targeting a Philippine coast guard vessel with a military-grade laser and temporarily blinding some of its crew in the South China Sea, calling it a “blatant” violation of Manila’s sovereign rights.
Wang said a Philippine coast guard vessel had trespassed into Chinese waters without permission on Feb. 6 and that Chinese coast guard vessels responded “professionally and with restraint.” China claims virtually all of the strategic waterway and has been steadiBEIJING
ly building up its maritime forces and island outposts.
“China and the Philippines are maintaining communication through diplomatic channels in this regard,” Wang said. China’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a question about the incident.
Adding to tensions, a U.S. fighter jet shot down an “unidentified object” over Lake Huron on Sunday on orders from President Joe Biden. It was the fourth such downing in eight days in an extraordinary chain of events over U.S. airspace that Pentagon officials believe has no peacetime precedent.
The three unidentified objects were traveling at such a low altitude as to pose a risk to civilian air traffic, said White House national security spokesman John Kirby. While the Biden administration does not yet have evidence that they were equipped for spying purposes – or even belonged to China – officials have not ruled that out, he said.
“These were decisions based purely and simply on what was in the best interests of the American people,” Kirby said.
The weekslong succession of objects, starting with a giant white orb first detected over U.S. skies in late January, has puzzled American officials and captivated curiosity around the world. Though the three most recent objects differed in size, maneuverability and other characteristics from the surveillance balloon shot down Feb. 4 off the Carolina coast, officials moved to eliminate each one from the sky – actions that Pentagon officials believe has no peacetime precedent.
“Because we have not been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are, we acted out of an abundance of caution,” Kirby said.
One possibility that the U.S. has been able to rule out, officials said Monday, is any connection to extraterrestrial activity.
On Friday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the combined U.S.-Canada organization known as NORAD that provides shared defense of airspace over the two nations, detected and shot down an object near sparsely populated Deadhorse, Alaska.
Later that evening, NORAD detected a second object, flying at a high altitude over Alaska, U.S. officials said. It crossed into Canadian airspace on Saturday and was over the Yukon, a remote territory, when it was ordered shot down by Trudeau.
In both of those incidents, the objects were flying at roughly 40,000 feet. The object on Sunday was flying at about 20,000 feet. None of the three most recent objects has been recovered, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Brussels, where he was scheduled to attend a NATO defense ministers meeting this week.
Austin said weather has impeded recovery efforts in Alaska, while in Canada the object was shut down in a very remote area that was also impeding efforts. In Alaska, where the object landed on sea ice, windchill and safety concerns “are dictating recovery timelines,” he said.
The Chinese balloon shot down by the U.S. was equipped to detect and collect intelligence signals as part of a huge, military-linked aerial surveillance program that targeted more than 40 countries, the Biden administration declared Thursday, citing imagery from American U-2 spy planes.