US Secretary of State Antony Blinken found the perfect excuse to postpone his trip to Beijing. A Chinese balloon was flying over the northern state of Montana, and the president ordered that it be shot down.
It was an ill-planned trip anyway, and nothing was likely to come out of it.
The State Department never announced the visit but details were leaked bit by bit to the media. Just two days before Blinken’s scheduled arrival in Beijing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry uncharacteristically refused to offer any details about his trip. Replying to several specific queries regarding Blinken’s visit to China during a press briefing on Feb 3, the spokesperson flatly denied any knowledge, saying, “I have nothing to offer at the moment.”
China never addressed the meeting until Jan 17 when Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin acknowledged the planned meeting in response to a question at the ministry’s weekly press briefing. Who Blinken was to meet and what was on the agenda were never announced. The visit was believed to be at the behest of both President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden at their G20 meeting last November in Bali with the hope of opening up dialogue between the two countries.
Insiders claimed that China was not prepared to talk to the US at this time and Blinken apparently knew of this feeling in Beijing. The balloon came to the rescue.
Commercial weather balloons are not new, and most countries use them to track weather conditions. However, one wayward balloon, in particular, followed the wind up toward the Aleutian Islands, over Alaska and then downward over Canada to the US state of Montana near the Canadian border.
Soaring 60,000 feet (18.3 kilometers) in the air, way above commercial aircraft flight paths, the large balloon meandered slowly across the sky to wherever the wind moved it. The Pentagon generals alerted their president that a Chinese “spycraft” was hovering over its secret rocket silos in Montana and called for immediate action. Biden ordered a multimillion-dollar offensive against the mutant balloon and dispatched two F-22 Raptor jets (each costing between $206million and $216 million) to deal with the “intruder”. The seasoned war-torn jets from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, were fitted out with AIM 9X Sidewinder missiles from the Ukraine stockpile with each costing at least a cool $390,000. The generals, obviously not worried about the balloon gathering more secrets, advised the president to wait a couple of days for the balloon to move over the sea where there would be less damage from falling debris to the inhabitants below. As the balloon slowly moved over the Carolina coast, the jets took off and at more than 2,400 kilometers an hour they took little time to reach their objective and fire one Sidewinder at their target.
The balloon plummeted to the sea below and saved the day for Blinken. He announced on the eve of his scheduled departure that he could not possibly travel to Beijing under such “hostile” conditions and postponed the trip.
The whole episode made the US a laughing stock, both domestically and internationally. The mass media and social platforms had a field day with satire, cartoons, TV talk shows and political commentaries all putting in their two bits on how to handle the errant balloon. Many suggested sticking a pin in the balloon to deflate it as an inexpensive way of dealing with the problem. Most opined that the slow-moving balloon was fairly harmless as Canada and Latin America had not worried about it. In fact, the whole episode was just a lot of hot air.
Former CIA/FBI agent Phil Mudd said on CNN: “On a scale of one to 10 on national security issues, I’d give it a two.” He added that if the Chinese wanted to collect photos of America, they could go to Google Earth or use their satellites.
The authoritative US-based The Diplomat magazine reported that sections of China’s officialdom and academia were adamant that the US secretary of state would not be welcome in Beijing at this time.
In the first in-person China-US engagement after President Biden took office, China’s top diplomats, Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, flew to Anchorage, Alaska, to meet with Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The magazine said the Chinese side gave a heavy dressing down to Blinken for his unusually blunt public remarks at the start of the two-day verbal duel criticizing “China’s increasing authoritarianism and assertiveness at home and abroad”.
“Hence,” said The Diplomat, “it is not at all surprising that some Chinese commentators are puzzled as to why the US secretary of state is “anxious” to visit China.
It is understood that two factors explain why China is unenthusiastic about Blinken’s visit. First, there is a dislike for Blinken personally. Many believe that Blinken being basically a Democratic Party staffer was not cut out for the job of conceptualizing and implementing foreign policy. But more importantly, Blinken is viewed as someone who not only has embraced the policy of containing China but is also an embodiment of ideological rigidity.
Basically, Chinese officials have an unfavorable attitude toward Washington as a whole at the moment, because of hostile moves by the Biden administration in supplying arms to Taiwan of China, banning exports of American technology to Huawei, and restricting sales of computer chips to China.
The author is a former chief information officer of the Hong Kong government, a PR and media consultant, and a veteran journalist.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.