WASHINGTON — Within the wake of a U.S. missile attack Saturday that destroyed a Chinese surveillance ballon, political and diplomatic fallout ramped up Monday in each Beijing and Washington.
The choice to shoot down the balloon over the Carolina coast was “unacceptable and irresponsible,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said at a press conference in Beijing Monday.
The Chinese government insists the balloon that moved across the USA for the past week was “a civilian airship used for meteorological and other research purposes,” and never a spy balloon.
American officials dismiss this explanation, and say the high-altitude unmanned vessel was designed to gather military intelligence, not weather data.
The balloon’s presence over the USA prompted Secretary of State Antony Blinken to indefinitely postpone a diplomatic visit to Beijing that was to start last Friday.
The balloon incident has strained the already fragile U.S.-China relationship, weakened in recent times by Beijing’s territorial expansion within the South China Sea and its aggressive effort to manage Taiwan.
“The nascent US-China détente is now in critical condition, if not entirely dead, and any future détentes can be similarly vulnerable to derailment by domestic politics,” Gabriel Wildau, managing director at advisory firm Teneo, said in a note.
On Capitol Hill, each Republicans and Democrats in Congress have demanded more transparency from the Biden administration on how and when the White House learned of the balloon, and why Biden waited every week to present the order to shoot it down.
In the approaching week, Biden administration officials will deliver a classified briefing on the balloon to members of the so-called Gang of Eight, the Republican and Democratic leaders of each the House and Senate, and the highest two members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
A briefing for the remaining of the Senate will happen the next week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced at a Sunday press conference.
Several congressional hearings on U.S.-China relations will even happen this week. The hearings were arranged before the balloon was discovered, however the incident is more likely to change the tenor of the hearings and the questions posed to witnesses.
On Tuesday at 10 a.m., the House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on “Combatting the Economic Threat from China.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing Thursday morning entitled “Evaluating U.S.-China Policy In The Era of Strategic Competition.”
