Blinken postpones China visit following 'spy balloon' appearance over US Airspace

A second Chinese spy balloon was spotted flying over Latin America on Friday, according to the Pentagon. Shortly after the "mysterious" appearance, United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, postponed a visit to China after the intrusion of a separate high-altitude Chinese balloon into US airspace.

Blinken’s trip, due to begin on Friday night, has been postponed until circumstances are more “conducive”, US officials said. The diplomat postponed his trip just two hours prior to departing Washington for Beijing, marking a significant new phase in the already strained bilateral ties between the US and China.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the US government has been tracking the balloon for several days. “We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America,” said Ryder, a day after the first craft was spotted over US airspace. “We now assess it as another Chinese surveillance balloon,” he added.

He told reporters on Thursday that the balloon was "travelling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) continues to track and monitor it closely," he said, adding the balloon was spotted over Montana on Thursday and is "said to be the size of three buses".

Montana, a sparsely populated state, is home to one of only three nuclear missile silo fields in the US, at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

"Once the balloon was detected, the US government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information," Ryder said.

Meanwhile, in South Korea on Friday, Blinken said he had spoken with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, and “made clear that the presence of this surveillance balloon in US airspace is a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law”.

“The first step is getting the surveillance asset out of our airspace. That’s what we’re focused on,” he told reporters.

Blinken would become the first US Secretary of State to visit China, since October 2018, and would serve as a follow-up to President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November last year in Bali, Indonesia.

Last month, Blinken stated that he would utilise this trip to "establish guardrails" to prevent the relationship from escalating into an all-out conflict.

Following claims of espionage, Chinese officials promptly responded by claiming that "it was a weather balloon - a civilian airship that had been blown off course".

"The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. The airship deviated far from its planned course," the spokesperson said in a statement posted on the Chinese foreign ministry's website.

"Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure," read the statement.

Chinese foreign secretary Mao Ning told reporters in Beijing on Friday that China was verifying the Pentagon's report on the balloon. "China is a responsible country and always abides strictly by international law. We have no intention of violating the territory or airspace of any sovereign country," she said, urging Western media to "stay calm" until "facts" are published.

The foreign ministry also claimed that the Western media is using this incident to "discredit" China at a time when US-China relations are at an all-time low.

Meanwhile, a US defence official said that Biden had explored military options but that the Pentagon concluded that shooting the object down would put people on the ground at risk from debris, as supported by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Mark Milley and US Northern Command Gen Glen VanHerck who recommended the President not to "take kinetic action"

"Currently, we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective. But we are taking steps nevertheless to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information," said the defence official.

Canada’s National Defence also released a statement saying that it was monitoring a “potential second incident”.

Despite this escalation, channels of communications remained open between the two nations; and US officials stressed that Blinken's visit had only been postponed, not cancelled.

"We had a broad, substantive agenda in mind," a senior state department official said. "We had hoped for constructive engagement on all elements of our bilateral relationship, but this issue would have narrowed that agenda in a way that would have been unhelpful and unconstructive."

The trip would've been an entry-point for discussions on several points of friction, such as, the conflicted territory of Taiwan, each side’s military positioning in the Indo-Pacific, China’s human rights record and its military activities in the South China Sea.

First used by the French at the Battle of Fleurus against Austrian and Dutch troops in 1794, and recently revived by the US, The Guardian defines 'spy balloons' as "pieces of spying equipment suspended beneath a balloon that floats above a given area, carried by wind currents. The equipment attached to the balloons may include radar and be solar powered and operate at 24,000 metres – 37,000 metres." 

"Balloons can also scan more territory from a lower altitude and spend more time over a given area because they move more slowly than satellites," according to a 2009 report by the US Air Command and Staff College.