Antony Blinken postpones China trip after Beijing confirms balloon spotted over Montana is its property
- The US secretary of state says he will reschedule his visit, as some US lawmakers call for the balloon to be shot down
- ‘The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,’ a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson says
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will postpone his trip to China next week, after Beijing acknowledged that a suspected surveillance balloon detected over the US is from China and expressed regret over the incident – a setback to recent efforts to halt a deterioration in bilateral relations.
Blinken confirmed an earlier State Department announcement that he would postpone the trip, saying on Friday afternoon that he had notified China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi. Wang, who stepped down as foreign minister in December, now heads the office of the Communist Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission.
Blinken said he told Wang in a telephone conversation “that the presence of this surveillance balloon in US airspace is a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law … and that the PRC decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have”.
Blinken said that he planned to visit Beijing when conditions allowed and that the US would continue to maintain lines of communication with China, including to address the balloon situation.
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Pentagon says it is tracking ‘Chinese spy balloon’ in US ahead of Blinken’s first trip to Beijing
“The first step is getting the surveillance asset out of our space, and that’s what we’re focused on,” Blinken said.
Blinken said that “it was very important for Wang Yi, the senior foreign policy official in Beijing, to hear this directly from me”.
“The world expects the United States and China to manage our relationship responsibly,” he added. “The United States will continue to act in a way that reflects that responsibility. We look to our PRC counterparts to do the same.”
Blinken made his remarks during a joint news conference with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin after the two had signed an agreement on science and technology cooperation.
Park said he supported the decision to postpone the visit after receiving a “very detailed” US account about the situation.
“China should make a swift and very sincere explanation about what happened,” Park said.
Earlier on Friday, the China foreign ministry said the balloon had accidentally strayed from its planned course into American airspace, as some US lawmakers called for the craft to be shot down.
Describing the balloon as an unmanned “airship” employed for civilian purposes, the Chinese foreign ministry said that it is used for research, mainly meteorological purposes, but that it had deviated far from its planned course because of strong westerly winds and its limited self-steering capability.
“The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,” the ministry spokesperson said in a statement.
“The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation.”
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Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, agreed with the Pentagon’s assessment that the balloon is surveilling; if the object was a meteorology tool gone astray, she said, Beijing would have likely informed US authorities before it entered American airspace.
Still, she found it surprising that US President Joe Biden’s administration was taking the issue so seriously, since such incidents are not unusual in the context of surveillance that China conducts on a regular basis via satellites, air and sea crafts.
“I call it a daily task [undertaken by the Pentagon] to try to prevent them from doing so,” said Mastro, who is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.
“This is less observable than satellites passing over or aircraft or ships that are flying near US coasts or are gathering intelligence,” she added. “Those are much larger platforms and larger radar cross sections.”
Balloon surveillance “isn’t more capable than a satellite … but it is jarring to people because it is over US territory and it highlights the ability of China to reach out and touch the United States in ways that maybe the average person was unaware of”, Mastro said.
Pentagon officials said in a separate briefing on Friday that the balloon was continuing to move eastward over the US and would be over US airspace for several more days, but declined to confirm a specific trajectory.
A Defence Department official echoed in the briefing the State Department’s assessment that the incident “violated … international law” and confirmed that the Pentagon had “conveyed this directly to the PRC at multiple levels”.
The balloon was initially spotted over the northern intermountain state of Montana, which is home to one of three US nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
The Pentagon official reiterated on Friday that the balloon posed “no threat, a physical threat or military threat, to people on the ground”.
The department said on Thursday that officials decided not to shoot the balloon down to avoid hurting people or damaging property on the ground.
Several Republicans called for the Pentagon to take the balloon down, and used the situation to criticise US President Joe Biden.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana tweeted that the balloon should be brought down, calling it a “clear provocation”.
Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations who is expected to run for president in 2024, also sought aggressive action.
“Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable,” she tweeted on Friday.
“Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.”
The Pentagon announced the discovery days before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expected trip to China next week, the first such high-profile visit to Beijing since the pandemic.
The purpose of the trip was expected to be to build guardrails for Washington-Beijing relations and prevent tensions from veering into a conflict.
Paul Triolo, senior vice-president with Albright Stonebridge Group, a Washington-based consultancy, called the balloon incident “a huge setback for efforts on both sides to put a floor on the relationship’s trajectory and begin to erect guardrails heading into a tough domestic political year on both sides”.
“If the momentum towards improving bilateral ties and de-risking complex issues such as Taiwan is to continue, both sides will want to reschedule the meeting as soon as possible,” he said.
“China is a responsible country and has always abided by international law. We have no intention of violating the territory or airspace of any sovereign state,” the spokeswoman Mao Ning said.
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Other analysts said that the balloon incident had not necessarily slammed the door on further diplomatic engagement. M. Taylor Fravel, director of security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted that the State Department decided not to cancel Blinken’s trip outright.
“However, Blinken’s visit was postponed and not cancelled, and China has issued an unusual statement expressing regret,” he said. “Taken together, this suggests room for diplomacy to continue, which remains critical, especially when incidents between the two countries occur.”
Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, made the same point: “Beijing is downplaying the incident instead of escalating it; Blinken is postponing, not cancelling.”
“I do not think this incident will, so to speak, derail the search for guardrails. That said, I don’t think those guardrails will be easy to agree on.”
