China suggests furor over balloon is sign of US decline
While many in the world see the Chinese spy balloon as a sign of Beijing’s growing aggressiveness, China has sought to cast the controversy as a symptom of the United States’ irrevocable decline.
Why else would a great power be spooked by a flimsy inflatable craft, China has argued, if not for a raft of internal problems like an intensely divided society and intractable partisan strife driving President Biden to act tough on Beijing?
The balloon incident “has shown to the world how immature and irresponsible — indeed hysterical — the United States has been in dealing with the case,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.
Chinese propaganda has tried to score points against the Biden administration, mocking it as flailing, overreacting, and trying to outflank its hard-right Republican opponents to demonstrate who can stand taller against Beijing. Nowhere in China’s response has the government acknowledged the balloon’s cost to its own credibility and the mounting evidence that it was all too willing to spy on its neighbors and beyond.
Instead, on Tuesday, China sought to show it had already moved on from the incident. Much of the country’s messaging tended to strategic interests elsewhere in the world. China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, spoke of shoring up ties with the European Union to break the grip of US influence within the bloc.
And China welcomed Iran’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, to Beijing, where he’ll meet with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in a sign of the two countries’ shared vision of a more multipolar world, free of Washington’s dominance.
Xi underscored that point last week when he delivered a speech at the Central Party School in which he proclaimed that “Chinese-style modernization” was a new model for human advancement that dispelled the notion that “modernization is equal to Westernization.”
The speech echoed more subtly the steady drumbeat of anti-American rhetoric that has filled the opinion sections of Chinese state media since the balloon was shot down by a US fighter jet off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.
Tensions heated up over the weekend, with the United States shooting down three unidentified flying objects over North America, and China announcing it would down a mysterious craft near the Bohai Sea. It marked a moment of geopolitical brinkmanship amid deepening concerns about the trajectory of the relationship between China and the United States, now at its lowest point in decades.
At the heart of that disquiet are questions about the ability of each country’s leadership to manage nationalistic sentiment and steer the two powers away from a collision course.
As China’s most ardent nationalist leader in generations, Xi can’t be seen bowing to US pressure without undermining his core promise to the Chinese people of rejuvenating the nation, a project he frames in civilizational terms as the East rising and the West declining.
China’s tone has shifted markedly in recent days. After at first uncharacteristically expressing regret for the balloon that emerged over Montana, China accused the United States of waging “information and public opinion warfare.”
This week, Beijing said that high-altitude US balloons had flown over Chinese airspace on more than 10 occasions since May of last year, a claim the White House immediately denied.