By PHELIM KINE
with STUART LAU
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Hi, China Watchers. Today we mark this week’s one-year anniversary of the Chinese spy balloon incident by unpacking some of its unanswered questions, and examine the Biden administration’s concerns about China’s cyberwarfare capabilities. And we profile a book that warns that the endgame of Xi Jinping Thought is a remade world order in which “the U.S. will need to know its place.”
Let’s get to it. — Phelim
Unanswered questions haunt Chinese spy balloon anniversary
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巴丢草 Bad ї ucao |
A year ago this Friday, the Pentagon’s disclosure that it was tracking a Chinese spy balloon floating over Montana plunged bilateral relations into deep freeze for months.
The incident sparked public concern that U.S. airspace was vulnerable to potentially hostile foreign intrusions, derailed a long-planned visit to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and stoked rhetoric on Capitol Hill that Beijing posed an existential threat to the United States. China claimed the object was a weather balloon and its top diplomat Wang Yi called the administration’s decision to shoot it down with fighter jets “hysterical and absurd.”
Now both the Biden administration and Beijing just seem to want to move on. The White House declined to respond to questions about the incident and Beijing is equally tight-lipped. “The facts about the incident have always been clear, and the Chinese side has stated our position many times,” the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement. National security adviser Jake Sullivan barely mentioned the incident in a one-hour discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday on the state of bilateral relations.
The Biden administration “wants to bury it because they know that Xi Jinping really didn’t have anything to do with it, that it wasn’t some sort of effort against the United States and that no one intended it to be over Montana,” said Dennis Wilder, former National Security Council director for China and senior fellow at Georgetown’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. U.S. officials confirmed two weeks after the balloon’s destruction that winds had blown it off course. Biden said in June that he doubted Xi Jinping knew about the spy balloon prior to its discovery.
But unanswered questions about the balloon may hinder the administration’s efforts to turn the page on the incident.
What’s with the FBI analysis of the balloon wreckage?
The FBI began an analysis of the balloon wreckage shortly after its retrieval. Blinken said on Feb. 8 that the U.S. would share the findings of its probe of the balloon’s debris “with our allies and partners around the world.” The administration hasn’t publicly released the findings of that analysis. The Pentagon declined to comment on that decision while the State Department referred China Watcher to the White House, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.
That’s not good enough for Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), whose hometown of Surfside Beach had a ringside seat to the balloon’s destruction by F-22 fighter jets on February 4. Fry sponsored the Chinese Spy Balloon Assessment Act last month which if passed will require the Defense Secretary to share details of the FBI analysis with Congress including “the technology and materials recovered from the surveillance balloon.”
That transparency is important because “we still don’t know a lot. …Congress and the American people are kind of left in the dark presently,” Fry said. It’s uncertain whether the bill will get legislative traction — Fry has lined up 21 GOP lawmaker cosponsors but so far Democratic members are steering clear.
Did it transmit intel back to China or not?
Pentagon spokesperson Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters in June that the balloon didn’t collect any intel during its flight over the United States. Then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley said in September that “there was no intelligence collected by that balloon.” However in December NBC reported that the balloon “used an American internet service provider to communicate” with its home base in China.
The Pentagon says that didn’t happen. The balloon “did not collect any intelligence while it transited the United States and that it did not transmit any intelligence back to China,” said Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough.
Skepticism abounds. “I don’t believe three quarters of what the Pentagon said on the balloon — there’s a lot of obfuscation going on here and you have people in the Pentagon trying to cover their butts because they are embarrassed,” said former NSC official Wilder.
What about that Chinese apology?
Beijing did something remarkable within hours of the start of the U.S. news coverage of the balloon’s trajectory across the U.S. — it apologized. Sort of. “The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into U.S. airspace,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The Biden administration’s disregard of that apology and Blinken’s cancelation of his trip to Beijing as a reprisal measure may have been a strategic error.
“Why did nobody in the administration understand that apology? The Chinese never apologize — that was so obvious Chinese code that ‘this is a screw up,’” said Wilder. Blinken’s trip cancellation “derailed our own attempt at stabilizing the relationship … and just reinforced to the Chinese that we really don’t want to play fair with them,” Wilder argued.