It was a darkly comic, made-for-media case: a Chinese hot air balloon flying about 20 kilometres over American soil, shot down by a US fighter jet over the weekend. It ignited a fairly confused diplomatic crisis, with China now saying it reserves the right to a response, and has laid bare the fragile state of relations between the world’s two most powerful nations.
The mere existence of the balloon — China claims it was a civilian weather-monitoring device, but the US is convinced it was spying, possibly on nuclear facilities — saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancel his planned visit to meet his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.
It’s a worrying setback in efforts by the US and China to steady a relationship tattered by Chinese adventurism — of which the balloon is yet another example — and US determination to contain China’s rise, particularly regarding the technology underpinning its economic and military might.
In a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun, the incident echoes a 1960 incident in which a US U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured. This week’s jumpy, trigger-happy reaction by the US — destroying the balloon with a heat-seeking missile — and Blinken’s cancelled visit confirms that the two nations are in an effective Cold War, now with its own echoes of Dr Strangelove.
A threat or overreaction?
What’s curious about the furore over the shot-down balloon is that China appears to have been regularly deploying such balloons in recent years — there’s at least one aloft over South America. Indeed the US Defense Department admitted three such balloons were tracked during the Trump administration, making something of a mockery of claims by Republicans last week that President Joe Biden was being weak on China by not shooting it down (he was waiting until it was over clear water to avoid any injury or property damage).
The Pentagon also admitted it had been tracking the balloon for several days before its existence became public, and said it could not gather any more information than satellites could.
So there are more questions than answers. Why has such a fuss been made over one balloon? There are hundreds of spy satellites high enough to be beyond sovereign airspace that constantly look down on every square inch of the US, China, Russia and countless other countries.
The US has well over 100, Russia about 74 and China 68. A handful of countries have seven military satellites, including India, the UK and Germany. France and Israel each have a military satellite. Perhaps the accepted norm is that these satellites are so high their presence doesn’t count as an intrusion into airspace?
Spies will spy and this goes for myriad countries — including Australia — which are happy to spy whenever they can get away with it. And sometimes not. Close to home, we have the 2004 spying on the Timor-Leste cabinet and subsequent spying on the wife of then president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a moment at least as clumsy as the Chinese balloon.
Beyond balloons
In this new Cold War situation of rising international tensions, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, military assets and activities are being ramped up — and spying is part and parcel.
“Over the last decade, China has ramped up its space program, at least in part to allow the nation to use satellites for military purposes,” said Travis Langster, US Department of Defence principal director of space and missile defence policy, in a recent interview.
In that time, China has doubled its annual launches and its satellites in orbit, “launching over 150 satellites in 2022 alone, bringing China’s total to over 650. Among these many satellites are advanced communications systems able to transmit large amounts of data; improved positioning, navigation and timing capabilities; and increasingly sophisticated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [ISR] technologies; and techniques improving what China can collect from space,” he said.
Security experts are also concerned that Chinese-owned companies have their gear embedded in devices and systems in the US and the West. Australia, the US and the UK have banned telecom networks and devices groups Huawei Technologies and ZTE.
There is also widespread use of Lenovo computers (formerly IBM), Motorola phones and Hikvision surveillance cameras, which are still used by the Australian government. On a broad consumer level, countless millions of people use the TikTok social media platform. All these companies are subject to the demands of China’s ruling Communist Party.
In October 2022, the US Federal Communications Commission confirmed the ban on Huawei and ZTE and indicated it would like to ban TikTok.
China’s response
China initially apologised (for getting caught) due to the balloon drifting low in American airspace, “regretting” that it had strayed off course — but its bristling reaction to it being shot down is nothing but posturing.
“China will resolutely uphold the relevant company’s legitimate rights and interests, and at the same time reserves the right to take further actions in response,” China’s ministry of foreign affairs said.
China’s reaction is hypocritical when we recall its response in 2001 to the EP-3 case, which involved a US spy plane nearing Chinese airspace — not actually intruding — but being shot down regardless. Unlike the balloon, there were people in that one.
The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department just couldn’t help itself, in the process inadvertently giving fresh fodder for China hawks, led by the Murdoch media, to urge more “tough on China” measures. Fox News in the US called it a “Sputnik moment” and “a Biden policy blunder”.
“Joe Biden must now be tough on China in the lead-up to next year’s presidential election, lest he be accused of being soft,” fulminated The Australian’s Adam Creighton.
Still, the balloon and the reactions around it are a symbol of the growing tensions between China and the US. It came hot on the heels of the surprise announcement that the Philippines would give the US access to four more military bases, bringing the total to nine.
The increased access to more bases “will make our alliance stronger and more resilient, and will accelerate modernisation of our combined military capabilities”, the US Defense Department said. Strategically this gives the US closer options to Taiwan.
Moves like this should concern Australia far more. As tensions continue to rise across the region about China’s clear intention to become the dominant power in the Pacific, and with Australia firmly in the US camp, the chance of being drawn into any stoush over Taiwan continues to rise.
Impact on Australia
America shooting down the balloon underscores the difficult path ahead for Australia in resetting its relationship with China, most particularly in trade. The mooted virtual meeting this week between Trade Minister Don Farrell and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao, went ahead yesterday, the first such meeting in three years. It’s a first step, and Farrell has been invited to Beijing.
For Australia, the word in diplomatic circles is that some movement on trade is expected next month — maybe barley, maybe wine — as China and its now bruised-by-COVID President Xi Jinping focuses on an economy smashed by the pandemic and draconian lockdowns.
In terms of the balloon, why its appearance was revealed when it was, leaving the US little choice but to take action — and thus setting back relations once more — is surely the story. It’s likely we may never know, but the important thing is for Washington and Beijing to redouble their efforts to calm things down and not give in to the hawks.
Is the kerfuffle over China’s balloon just a lot of hot air? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Biden had no choice about shooting down the balloon – US public opinion would have been strongly against him otherwise. Waiting gave them a chance to examine it’s operations and perhaps recover more debris from water than have it crash into land.
If it had have been punctured instead of exploded, it would have drifted rather than crashed to earth and given us the chance to see what it actually was.
That’s true, but how? Can you offer any credible method of puncturing a relatively small and slow-moving target at an altitude of nearly 20km? I don’t believe it has ever been done.
Military laser?
Navy divers are already in the process of recovering the stuff that was dangling from the balloon (see NY Times). The material of the balloon itself is probably not of much interest.
While the balloon was in transit it was being monitored the whole journey by a US RC-135U “Combat Sent” intelligence gathering plane, which would have been intercepting any radio or radar from the balloon. The US will try to decrypt that data to learn more about Chinese communications and potentially their encryption methods. One reason to not shoot it down over land (apart from potential damage to things on the ground) was that it was a great opportunity to monitor Chinese intelligence gathering.
Why don’t they do the investigation and then release the the findings rather than finding the accused guilty and then looking for the “evidence” to convict. Particularly as the US Government has a history of lying. WMD, etc.etc.
Can anyone say what source of heat the object was carrying that made it vulnerable to this missile? Or is the article wrong?
The article said that the balloon was a hot-air one, indicating either a completely new method of obtaining heat from -60° air, or nuclear power. The possibility that the author doesn’t know his arse from his elbow crossed my mind. He also said that the balloon travelled 20km over American soil, which isn’t really enough to do any serious spying. Other sources have said that was the altitude. My money is on the latter.
Given flagrant disregard of reality, mine anyway, at the beginning of an article gives little credibility to what follows. Are they all ideas snatched from the smoke-ridden ether of the opium den? Or is he just another mediocre journo on the Sinophobic bandwagon?
Maybe there’s simply nobody out there worth publishing, so fill the page with whatever.
“The word in diplomatic circles”. Really?
Yes, the description of it as a hot-air balloon is another curiosity. To operate at that altitude possibly it would carry an oxygen bottle or other oxidising agent as well as fuel, because not much is going to burn using only the oxygen in the atmosphere up there. Or maybe the Chinese, despite their historical association with paper lantern balloons, are clever enough to use a relatively cheap, easily available and naturally bouyant gas such as hydrogen and save themselves an awful lot of bother.
Minor nitpick. The AIM-9x is an optically-guided missile, targeted with a helmet lock-on by the pilot and then subsequently guided with a focal plane array system. Despite their size (and the large array of gear hanging from the balloon) the object likely had a very small radar footprint and an even smaller thermal footprint.
That makes much more sense. To be fair to the author of the article, the description “heat-seeking missile” is in plenty of other reports. Almost as though the various authors think this is a generic term for any missile that shoots things down.
Why does the media accept the US assertion of espionage and dismiss the Chinese assertion of scientific research? If someone wanted to spy on another country, they could do it much better if they didn’t leave the trajectory up to the whims of the jet stream, surely. Meteorological research does require sampling of the atmosphere at different heights (performed by balloon-deployed sensors) and I could easily imagine that espionage and scientific research employ largely the same technologies (cameras, radar, spectrophotometers) because these are all necessary to calibrate satellite remote sensing equipment, improve atmospheric transport modelling (eg. weather prediction).
I would be interested to know:
1) What is unique about the equipment on the balloon that makes it a spying operation rather than a research operation? I assume has been photographed at high resolution and forms the basis of US assertions of ill-intent.
2) If it was a research operation, did China publish the details of the project in advance? Surely it wouldn’t hurt to mention that the deployment was measuring x, y and z with the intention of improving understanding in some area and give the world a head’s up that these things may be overhead from time to time.
3) Why use an expensive explosive missile in preference to perforating the balloon with bullets. My understanding is that modern fighter aircraft can operate as high as 60000 ft. I would have thought perforation would allow for a more gentle descent and better recoverability of the instrument payload. Of course, destruction of the instrument payload would make it virtually impossible to confirm or refute either of the competing narratives.
Last time we accepted US assertions of evil intent (that I can recall) was WMDs. And that led to the Iraq War. And it was wrong.
I would prefer if a neutral 3rd party was allowed to recover the remains of the balloon and determine its capabilities. The US and China both have so much skin in the game that there will be a strong temptation to skew the findings to support a narrative.
Seems to me this whole affair is essentially for US domestic political considerations. Media coverage is superficial at best and misleading at worst. They should take more time to investigate prior to reporting rather than regurgitating press releases from the DoD.
On your point 3, see my earlier reply to Woopwoop. Anyway, the F-22 aircraft that brought it down was operating at 58,000 feet according to reports. There is a very limited choice of aircraft for that altitude. The F-22 does have a gun, but it is a 20 mm M61A2 Vulcan rotary cannon. In the unlikely event that gun was used to bring down the balloon (the difference in velocity of the balloon and F-22 would give almost no time at all to engage) there is very little chance anything much would be left. I cannot see anything sinister about the choice of a missile to bring it down, that is the only viable option. If it could have been punctured so it drifted down it would have suited the USA much better, but there is no credible way to hit a target with a few bullets at that altitude.
Military laser? Burning a hole?
Perhaps. Certainly more believable than shooting it with bullets. On the other hand, if operational military lasers are available with this capability why are there no reports of their use against drones or cruise missiles?
Typical Sainsbury One-eyed view on anything related to China. Should be working for Foreign Policy. I don’t know why Crikey keep this guy on.
Hot air balloon???? Helium filled almost certainly. Heat-seeking missile might work if it was in fact a hot-air balloon. At over 60,000ft altitude where the temperature is around -60 degrees celsius a heat seeker would have trouble finding any heat. A radar controlled missile…no problem. Successful canon fire would assume no compartments within the balloon. Lots of puerile guessing me thinks.
Why “almost certainly” helium? Compared to hydrogen, helium is expensive and significantly less bouyant, so it would need a bigger and more costly balloon. The flammability of hydrogen is irrelevant for this application.
Agreed, hydrogen is sometimes used in weather balloons with the usual caveat concerning safety.