The 2001 Airborne Collision between a U.S. Air Force Jet and a Chinese Aircraft: INDOPACOM and the United States

The People’s Liberation Army’s Southern Theater Command, in a report on China Military Online, had a different interpretation of the encounter, saying it was the US jet that “abruptly changed its flight attitude and forced the Chinese aircraft to the left.”

The RC-135 Rivet Joint, a US Air Force plane with about 30 people on board, was within 20 feet of a Chinese J-11 fighter jet on December 21. In response, the RC-135 had to take “evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision,” INDOPACOM said in a statement Thursday.

The US shot down a large, high- altitude balloon it says was set aloft by China and was part of a “fleet” of Chinese military balloons. China said the balloon was a civilian airship that drifted astray by accident.

Military aircraft from the U.S. and its allies are frequently challenged by China over the South China Sea. The 2001 in-air crash that killed the Chinese plane’s pilot was a result of such behavior.

The US will continue to sail, fly and operate in international airspace and at sea with due regard for the safety of vessels under international law, according to the statement.

Meanwhile in China: The US response to a jet intercepting the 135-body intercontinental flight in the early 2000s is pure theater

CNN published a version of the story in their newsletter called Meanwhile in China, a three-times-a-weekly update about what to know about the country and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

CNN contacted aviation and military experts who said the Chinese jet had no reason to be close to the American plane because it was in the wrong place.

“The 135 was in international airspace and is a large, slow, non-maneuverable aircraft. To stay clear, the smaller, fast, maneuverable aircraft must stay clear of the larger plane, said Peter Layton, a former Australian Air Force officer.

“The intent of the interception was presumably to visually identify the aircraft and the fighter could have stayed several miles away and competed that task. Getting closer brings no gains,” he said.

Layton pointed out another potential danger that could lead to escalation. The Chinese aircraft are armed with missiles, as seen in the US video.

But Hopkins also said the US military risked blowing the incident out of proportion in saying the US jet had to take “evasive maneuvers,” a term he described as “overly dramatic.”

“These are no different than a driver adjusting her position to avoid a temporary lane incursion by an adjacent driver,” Hopkins said. The US response is pure theater and it will cause an exaggerated sense of danger.

“Flying aircraft close to each other at 500 miles per hour with unfriendly intentions is generally unsafe,” said Blake Herzinger, a nonresident fellow and Indo-Pacific defense policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

The PLA and the War on the Free World: A Case Study of the 2001 March 13 Collision in the Hainan Island, China

Any type of hotlines for addressing potential incidents with the U.S. have been ruined by the PLA. If an intercept does go wrong, there are fewer options than ever for senior officers to limit potential escalation,” he said.

“The US’s provocative and dangerous moves are the root cause of maritime security issues. Wang, the Foreign Ministry’s counsellor, said that China wants the US to stop dangerous provocations and stop blaming China.

In Biden’s comments, he clearly stated that opposition to China has become a unifying point in US politics. China has long mounted a broad intelligence campaign against the US, using satellites, cyber and traditional methods of collection. The US has intelligence operations against China. The sight of a ballooning balloon that was visible from the ground and on television coverage showed a potential threat to US sovereignty from China that hadn’t been seen before amid talk of a new Cold War.

The most memorable example is of the presidency of George W. Bush. On April 1, 2001, two Chinese fighter jets harassed a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane over international waters near China. One collided with the EP-3 and crashed. The EP-3’s pilot managed to regain control of his heavily-damaged plane and made an unauthorized emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The 24 US crew members were held for 11 days, and some were repeatedly interrogated before US officials negotiated their release.

The Defense Secretary of the U.S. said last year that thePLA’s actions should worry us all because of a series of intercepts by Chinese warplanes.

BethSanner worked as the deputy director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration, overseeing elements that coordinate and lead collection, analysis and program oversight throughout the intelligence community. She was also the president’s intelligence briefer. She is a professor at the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland and a CNN national security analyst. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The move comes after a Chinese balloon suspected of carrying out surveillance flew over the US last week, raising political tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

The campaign vowed to impose new restrictions on Chinese ownership of US infrastructure, energy, technology, farmland, medical supplies and other assets and to shut off Chinese access to US secrets. It is not known how Trump will differ from the efforts currently underway. There are deep and intricate links between the US and China’s economies, and Biden and Trump have not acknowledged them. A direct military confrontation or full-scale war would be even more ruinous to the global economy.

President Jiang Zemin of China blamed the US for the collision. Nearly two months elapsed before the two sides reached agreement for the return of the aircraft. Having removed and refused to return the plane’s hardware, software and communications equipment, the Chinese insisted the EP-3 be dismantled and transported by a third party at the US’s expense. The Bush Administration was charged $1 million by Beijing for costs associated with the incident. Washington countered with an offer of some $34,000 it said was a “fair figure” — money China refused — and never apologized.

US officials registered their objections to Chinese officials while the balloon was in flight. They also communicated with Chinese officials after the balloon was shot down, according to senior administration officials.

The Secretary of State canceled a high-profile trip to Beijing due to the balloon incursion, which will delay a face-to-face meeting between Biden and the Chinese President. The meeting was aimed at cooling the tension that had been rising between the two powers throughout the first few weeks of Biden’s presidency.

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen’s book is called The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World. His own views are expressed in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

It reminded me of when my father worked for the US Air Force on a project to help send balloons into Soviet airspace.

In 1954 he was assigned to Headquarters Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the “Grand Union” project, which deployed balloons that carried cameras over the then-Soviet Union. Turkey launched the spy balloons.

My dad didn’t discuss this part of his career because it was a secret, but it has been declassified since the program was done in the 70s.

What Has China Overflown in the U.S. Over the Last Two Years? The Case of F-35 Suspicious Objects

An official stated that the PRC used these balloons. “High-resolution imagery from U-2 flybys revealed that the high-altitude balloon was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations.”

Now the United States and its rivals have these new-fangled gizmos called “spy satellites,” which can take photos! They can do full-motion video! They can take thermal imagery at night and see people moving around. When the skies are clear, they can spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters.

Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is now getting so inexpensive that you can go out and buy your own close-up images of, say, a Russian battle group in Ukraine. Maxar Technologies has a profitable business that was just acquired by a private equity firm for $6 billion.

It may help explain, at least in part, an element of a report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.

If they are not related to China, are the latest strange objects flying over North America linked to some other hostile power or group, corporate or private entity? Are they connected or are they the result of coincidences at a time of heightened awareness and tensions?

But China has arguably done much worse. US officials have accused it of benefiting from the work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 fighter aircraft as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they reportedly got inside the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015. China called the F-35 theft report “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.

China “has overflown these surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries across five continents,” the State Department official said, noting that “the Biden Administration is reaching out to countries directly about the scope of this program and answer any questions.”

There have been at least half a dozen flights over US airspace, according to one official familiar with the intelligence.

Balloons similar to the one found above Montana last week have been spotted in recent years above Japan, India and Taiwan. China admitted that a balloon it found above Latin America was its own, though it said it was a civilian research balloon.

The link to the broader surveillance program, which was uncovered before the latest balloon was spotted last week, was first reported by the Washington Post.

The intelligence community found the balloon to have an electronic component and that’s when the FBI was notified, the officials said. By late Sunday – the day after the balloon was shot down – agents had arrived at the scene, and the first pieces of recovered evidence arrived at the FBI lab in Quantico on Monday.

The revelation that the intelligence community only within the last year developed a reliable way to track China’s balloon fleet – which officials now say has flown dozens of missions worldwide – helps explain why Trump administration officials have stridently claimed to have had no knowledge of the three alleged flights over US territory during the former president’s time in office.

The biggest unanswered question, officials say, remains China’s intent. China continues to argue that the vessel was a weather balloon that drifted off-course and that its path over the United States was an accident. Officials have acknowledged that this type of balloon has only limited steering capabilities and largely rode the jet stream.

But multiple defense officials and other sources briefed on the intelligence say the Chinese explanation isn’t credible and have described the balloon’s path as intentional.

This elite team consists of agents, analysts, engineers and scientists, who are responsible for both creating technical surveillance measures and analyzing those of the US’ adversaries.

OTD personnel are responsible for managing court-authorized data collection in order to defeat attempts by foreign intelligence agencies to penetrate the US, but they also construct devices used by the FBI to target national security threats.

One member of the House Intelligence Committee said that there are many reasons why they wouldn’t do that. We want to collect off it so you can see what it is doing.

A defense official said the US has procedures in place to protect sensitive locations from overhead surveillement.

Address of the Second State of the Union to the Confining China: Xi Jinping Slams Autocracies and Democracy

Biden called out Beijing on Tuesday before millions of viewers in the US and around the world as diplomatic tensions with China soar and new details emerge of an expansive Chinese balloon surveillance program.

Moments later, in an ad-libbed addition to his speech, Biden specifically named Xi, as he slammed autocracies and argued for the superiority of democracies.

“Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping. Name me one!” Biden said of his Chinese counterpart, whom he last met in Indonesia last year and has known for years. The president was almost shouting at the end of a sentence that could be seen as disdainful of China’s stunning economic emergence at a time when Xi’s aura has been damaged by mismanagement of Covid-19.

Biden’s speech mostly concentrated on domestic issues. His address came at a moment of turmoil, when the United States is faced with another nuclear rival: Russia. He hailed the Western effort to counter President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and vowed to Kyiv’s ambassador, who was in the audience: “We are going to stand with you as long as it takes.”

The US stance on the issue hasn’t changed, even though Biden said as president he would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

His comments on Russia and China immediately followed each other, which made it impossible to miss the symbolism of Biden’s doctrine of standing against autocracies and applying their power outside of their borders.

Biden, who ordered the US military to shoot down the balloon over open water last week, said he has not spoken to the Chinese leader since the balloon was spotted. He pointed to continued contacts between his administration and Chinese counterparts.

The idea of shooting down a balloon that is gathering information makes relations worse. In an interview with Judy Woodruff a day after his second State of theUnion address, Biden spoke about a range of topics.

Biden administration officials have reassured the public that the meeting did not cancel, but was delayed until later. The date has not been set.

A source told Congress that the Biden officials believed that the senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party were unaware of the balloon mission over the US.

Biden administration officials have maintained that they were able to move quickly to reduce any intelligence collection capacity of the balloon, and that they will benefit from the ability to collect information about the balloon and Chinese intelligence capabilities during its flight and in the recovery of its wreck from the Atlantic Ocean.

The House will vote on a resolution Thursday that condemns the Chinese Communist Party’s use of a high-altitude balloon over the US as a blatant violation of United States sovereignty.

Some Republican lawmakers have raised pointed questions about why the Biden administration did not move to shoot down the balloon before it crossed down into the continental US – either while it was over Alaska or sooner.

The Discovery of a “Strange” High-Energy Airship from the US Navy on Monday: a Telling Observation from the Russian Embassy in Ukraine

And he detailed a telling observation he shared with Xi last year as US officials warned China not to provide military support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

The US Navy released photos Tuesday of its recovery effort of a suspected Chinese spy balloon, which US fighter jets shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.

On Monday, Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told reporters that the balloon was roughly 200 feet tall and carried a payload weighing more than a couple of thousand pounds.

“[F]rom a safety standpoint, picture yourself with large debris weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. VanHerck said that they were talking about that. There is potentially hazardous material such as glass off of solar panels and batteries required for batteries to operate in such an environment as the balloon that could have been present, the danger of explosives to destroy the balloon, and even the potential for explosives to shoot up the balloon.

“[T]his gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed, and I think you’ll see in the future that that time frame was well worth its value to collect over,” VanHerck said.

It was only when the balloon turned south that it “got strange,” a senior US official told CNN. “We immediately started talking about shooting it down, then.”

“The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident,” another statement from the Foreign Ministry said.

The Secretary of State was scheduled to visit Beijing within days, but that has been put off due to the situation.

China admitted that it owned the balloon, and said it deviated from its flight course by mistake.

“China is a responsible country,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Monday. “We have always strictly abided by international law. We informed all relevant parties and handled the situation appropriately, which did not pose a threat to any countries.

Aircraft, Airships and Balloons: China’s New Role in Joint Air and Space Command and Inter-Atmosphere Operations

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the PLA Air Force to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities” as early as 2014, and military experts have designated “near space” as a crucial link in the integration.

And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.

It’s also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that’s been leveraged for military reconnaissance as far back as the late 18th century, when French forces employed a balloon corps.

“With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.

A military expert explains how near-space lighter-than air vehicles can take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost than satellites.

An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.

The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. The US Department of Defense contracted an American firm to use their balloons as a way to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield, in 2021, according to statement from the firm.

A paper published last April by researchers at a PLA institute said that air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2007, and that was not provided by the documentary.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/china/china-balloon-near-space-development-intl-hnk/index.html

The US Air Space Abundance Crisis: When the DIA Spent a Shot on the Suspense of Alaska, and When the USA Sentered to Congress

“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.

CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.

The officials told lawmakers that the Chinese balloon operation, which resulted in little new intelligence, was due to the US protecting sensitive intel from China and the Chinese stopping them from sending it.

The “tipper” sent by the DIA also goes out across government channels routinely, and although US officials have access to these reports, whether they read them or whether those reports are included in briefings to senior policymakers is a matter of discretion.

The US decided to look at the object as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence rather than treating it as an immediate threat.

The political blame game is getting hotter. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” GOP Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, linked the incursions of US air space to Republican claims that Biden is failing to protect the southern border and complained that senior officials were not briefing Congress enough. And he also adopted a novel critique of Biden given claims that the president didn’t act quickly enough before.

According to defense officials, the NORAD sent up fighter jets to make a positive identification when the balloon entered the US airspace near Alaska.

The balloon was shot down over land in the US in order to gather additional intel on the balloon, but officials argued that the benefits of gathering more intelligence on the balloon outweigh the risk.

Military officials said that it’s not really surprising that the president wasn’t briefed until January 31, since he had high expectations for the balloon.

Congress is interested in the more information that is coming about the administration’s decision-making process.

“What did the Pentagon tell us about Alaska?” CNN’s Tom Brady told the House of Representatives to the Judicious Senate Committee on State and Homeland Security

“There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”

One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.

The Chinese balloon was found to be capable of being used to monitor the United States, according to an official.

Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Chinese President Xi Jinping’s knowledge, sources familiar with the briefing said.

The officials said the US only collected a small amount of electronics and the balloon canopy was on the ocean’s surface.

The commander of Northern Command and NORAD stated that they did not consider it to be a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in Chinese technical means.

Sources said that a number of Republicans were railing against the administration at the Thursday morning House briefing, including one who claimed that the president looked weak by their actions.

The Pentagon told us they were able to mitigate in real-time, which I think is accurate, and the concern they had was the safety of the population.

The administration, the president, the military and intelligence agencies acted with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive. Was everything done correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do. But I came away more confident,” Romney said Thursday.

The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Investigations into the Chinese Spy Balloon ‘Galaxy’

Democrats pushed officials at the hearing on Thursday over how the military could say that Chinese espionage wasn’t a military threat.

You need to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before and I’m telling you that it isn’t the last time. After seeing a long incursion, what will happen next, said the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Senator Jon Tester.

The Defense Department was not worried about the balloons gathering intel over Alaska as they were not close to sensitive sites.

The parts of the balloon have been delivered, but there are more pieces of the balloon that are still stuck in the ocean.

It’s not yet clear where the balloon’s parts were manufactured, the officials said, including whether any of the pieces were made in America. Because analysts have yet to look at the bulk of the equipment on the balloon, the officials said that there has not been a determination as to everything the device was capable of doing and its specific intent.

None of the exploded or offensive material they analysed posed a danger to the American public.

There was English writing on parts of the balloon that were found, one of the sources familiar with the congressional briefings said, though they were not high-tech components. The source declined to provide detail on what specific parts of the balloon contained English writing.

According to an official, they had no explanation for why the second balloon violated the airspace of South and Central America. The PRC will be harder to use the program due to the program being exposed.

As U.S. Navy crews continue to fish parts of the alleged Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic, a senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave reporters an update on Thursday on some of what has been learned so far.

The main electronics payload, however, has not been recovered yet, one of the FBI officials said, adding that it was “very early” to assess what the intent was and how the device was operating.

The shooting down of an Alaskan high-altitude object by an F-22 jet from Joint Base Elmendorf over territorial water and a threat to civilian flight

“That narrative is probably part of the information and public opinion warfare the U.S. has waged on China,” Mao added. The international community can see who the world’s number one country of espionage, spying and surveilling is.

The government is making improvements of its own. In 2018, for example, China launched a project to research materials that can be used to make balloons that can float higher without losing buoyancy.

Shortly after the commander-in-chief gave the US military approval to shoot down the high altitude object, President Joe Biden made a statement to CNN that the shoot down was a success.

An F-22 fighter jet from Joint Base Elmendorf in Alaska took down the object “at 1:45 p.m. eastern standard time today, within US sovereign airspace over US territorial water,” Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Friday.

The high-altitude object, Kirby said during a White House press briefing, was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.”

There were at least two attempts to get closer to the object and evaluate it. The first engagement by fighter aircraft took place late Thursday night and the second Friday morning. Both engagements yielded “limited” information, Kirby told reporters.

The order to shoot it down was made before the fighter jets were able to fly around it.

“President Biden authorized US fighter aircraft assigned to NORAD to conduct the operation and a US F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory in close coordination with Canadian authorities,” the White House statement said. “The leaders discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin.”

US Northern Command’s Alaska Command coordinated the operation with assistance from the Alaska Air National Guard, Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Ryder said.

The US Embassy in Beijing on Thursday night warned that the fallout of the Deadhorse object could undermine the US mission to enlarge relations with China

The best description we have right now is that which we are referring to as an object. We don’t know who owns it – whether it’s state-owned or corporate-owned or privately-owned, we just don’t know,” Kirby said.

The object was first looked at by the US government. Biden was first briefed Thursday night “as soon as the Pentagon had enough information,” Kirby said.

The object didn’t seem to be self-maneuvering and so was at the mercy of prevailing winds, making it less predictable.

The Federal Aviation Administration imposed a flight restriction for the area around Deadhorse as the military took action against the object.

According to CNN reporting, the assessment was brought to the attention of American lawmakers in briefings Thursday which could be a sign that the Chinese system is disorganized at a time of strained relations with the US.

It could mean that Xi and his top advisers underestimated the potential gravity of the fallout of the mission and the possibility it could imperil Blinken’s visit, which would have been the first from the most senior US diplomat since 2018 and had been welcomed by Beijing as a path to easing strained ties.

In China, the existence of state-owned enterprises and a robust military industrial complex blur the line between the government and the military, despite Beijing’s insistence that the device was only for companies.

“The problem with the centralization of power under Xi Jinping is the lack of delegation of authority to lower levels,” said Thompson, who is a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

That means that lower-level officials who may have the capacity to more closely monitor such missions may not be empowered to do so, or not be equipped to make political judgments about their impact, he said. Communication could be complicated by power struggles between officials.

There is tension within the Chinese system, where lower levels fight for their independence and upper levels fight for more control, he said.

The causes of tensions in China can be seen in past crises, including the outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease SIRS in 2002-2003 and the recent Covid-19, where the delayed reporting slowed the response and compounded the problem. Some blamed local officials who were used to a system in which information flowed from the top to the bottom.

Balloon launches could also fall into a gap in which operations were not managed or overseen in the same way as space or other aircraft missions, according to Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

In this case, entities launching balloons may have received “little or no push back from other countries, including the United States” and “increasingly seen such launches as routine based on weather conditions and at modest costs,” Yang said.

“As a result, while the leaders of these programs have also become emboldened over time to test new routes, it was likely that they didn’t get top priority attention from the perspective of political risk,” he said.

The Defense Ministry of China is refusing to grant government permission to obtain an object crossed into North American airspace, according to a statement by Anand

After the Pentagon announced that it was tracking a suspected balloon, the Foreign Ministry of China seemed to be unaware of what was happening.

“Because of his personality, he wants 100% (control),” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor, also at the NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “I don’t think Xi Jinping allows for that kind of autonomy.”

Instead, Xi may have been comfortable with an incident that diverted the attention of a public frustrated amid a faltering economy after years under the recently dismantled zero-Covid policy – but underestimated the US domestic response that resulted in the postponed talks, Wu said.

It is possible that Washington is trying to convey to Xi that he didn’t know about the situation when he met with US President Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Indonesia.

The US Commerce Department is restricting six Chinese companies tied to the Chinese army’s aerospace programs from obtaining US technology without government authorization.

The six companies are: Beijing Nanjiang Aerospace Technology; China Electronics Technology Group Corporation 48th Research Institute; Dongguan Lingkong Remote Sensing Technology; Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group; Guangzhou Tian-Hai-Xiang Aviation Technology; and Shanxi Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group.

“The Entity List is a powerful tool for identifying and cutting off actors that seek to use their access to global markets to do harm and threaten American national security.”

The object shot down in northern Canada on Saturday is the third time in a week that the US military has shot down an object in North American airspace.

The object appears to be a “cylindrical object” smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down previously, Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said at a news conference on Saturday.

The object crossed into Canadian airspace and the monitoring continued with the assistance of the Canadian air force and a few other aircraft, according to the statement.

The Biden-Trudeau Spectrometer on Twitter: What have we learned in the last two weeks? An update on the situation in the southwest of China

US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both approved the shoot down on Saturday, according to a statement from the White House.

The FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will be working closely together while Canadian authorities conduct recovery operations.

Pilots gave different accounts of what they observed after coming near the object, a source briefed on the intelligence told CNN; some pilots said it “interfered with their sensors,” but other pilots said they didn’t experience that.

The paper reported that the maritime authority in China’sShandong province spotted a flying object in the ocean and were planning to shoot it down.

In a text message to fishing vessels, maritime authorities in the neighboring port city of Qingdao told crews to be on alert to avoid danger and assist with debris recovery efforts if possible.

“If debris falls near your boat, please help take photos to collect evidence. The marine development department of the Jimo district in Quzhou said that if conditions allow, please help them save it.

Chinese authorities and state media have not updated as of Monday afternoon, and it is not clear if the object has already been taken down.

Many Chinese users were waiting for the object to be taken down on Sunday evening, when social media was filled with excitement. “Thanks to the demonstration made by the US, we must report it in a high-profile manner when we shoot down (the object),” said a top comment on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

“In light of the People’s Republic of China balloon that we took down last Saturday, we have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we detected over the past week,” said Melissa Dalton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs.

A deepening national security mystery is threatening a political storm after US fighter jets scrambled three days in a row to shoot down a trio of unidentified aerial objects high over the North American continent.

The intrigue is also unfolding against a tense global situation, with already difficult relations with rising superpower China becoming ever more hostile and with the US leading the West in an effective proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, hours before an airborne object was shot down over Lake Huron.

On Friday, an F-22 shot down another unidentified craft over Alaskan airspace . US pilots were able to get up around the object before it was shot down and reported that it didn’t appear to be carrying surveillance equipment.

In fact, NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said recent objects shot down were likely the first “kinetic action” that NORAD or the US Northern Command had taken against an airborne object over US airspace.

The China Balloon and the Latest Objects: The Ubiquitous Case of the Biden Defendant and the Secretary of State

In a fast moving situation, the government may not know much more than it is saying. But the piecemeal emergence of details is adding to the confusion. The administration has sometimes struggled to control its own narrative on issues including the Chinese balloon and the discovery of classified vice presidential documents.

The lack of specificity is unlikely to quell speculation or partisan maneuvering in Washington. This string of incidents, which began a new Presidential election cycle and include the Chinese balloon debacle, is putting fresh pressure on Biden following his decision to wait until the balloon crossed the US before shooting it down.

Turner told Jake Tapper that they don’t appear to be happy, but that this is preferable to the permissive environment that they showed when the Chinese spy balloon was coming over.

“I think one thing that this shows is certainly the fallacy of the argument of the Biden administration saying that the height of the Chinese balloon caused them to have no concern because certainly, as we know, whatever goes up can come down.”

Biden did not address the intrusions at a blacktie event with state governors on Saturday, but he has yet to speak to Americans in person about them.

“They are getting lots of positives that they did not get before. Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said most of that will be airplanes.

There is not a clear answer about if this bigger focus picking up a lot of stuff because it didn’t pose a threat is part of something or if it is an organized effort to watch us all.

There was more confusion on Sunday. Schumer said on ABC that the two balloons that were shot down over Alaska, but smaller than the original Chinese bandit, were not replicas of the Chinese bandit.

Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana appeared to make a direct link Sunday on “CNN Newsroom” between the Chinese balloon and the latest objects, even if there is no confirmation so far that they are connected.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/unknown-objects-leaders-response/index.html

How do we live in the 21st century and what do we need to know about the CP-violancing laws in the U.S.?

“It doesn’t give me much safe feelings knowing that these devices are smaller,” he said. Cumulative data that is collected is very concerning to me. I need some answers, and the American people need them.