China's Foreign Ministry said Friday that a balloon the U.S. suspects of conducting surveillance was a civilian 'airship' used for research, mainly meteorological purposes.
BEIJING — China said Friday that a balloon spotted over American airspace was used for weather research and was blown off course, despite U.S. suspicion it was spying. The discovery further strained already tense relations between Beijing and Washington.
Blinken would be the highest-ranking member of President Joe Biden's administration to visit China, on a mission to mitigate a sharp downturn in relations between the countries amid trade disputes and concerns about Beijing's increasingly aggressive stance toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. On Thursday, a senior American defense official told Pentagon reporters that the U.S. has"very high confidence" that the object spotted over U.S. airspace in recent days was a Chinese high-altitude balloon and that it was flying over sensitive sites to collect information. One of the places the balloon was spotted was Montana, which is home to one of the nation's three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio Biden was briefed and asked the military to present options, according to a senior administration official, who was also not authorized to publicly discuss sensitive information. The senior defense official said the U.S. prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot down the balloon if ordered.
The defense official would not specify the size of the balloon but said commercial pilots could spot it from their cockpits.A photograph of a large white balloon lingering over the area was captured by The Billings Gazette. It could be seen drifting in and out of clouds and had what appeared to be a solar array hanging from the bottom, said Gazette photographer Larry Mayer.
Tensions with China are particularly high on numerous issues, ranging from Taiwan and the South China Sea to human rights in China's western Xinjiang region and the clampdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong. Not least on that list of irritants are China's tacit support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its refusal to rein in North Korea's expanding ballistic missile program and ongoing disputes over trade and technology.
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