U.S. Briefed Foreign Diplomats On China’s Spy Balloon Program from U.S. Embassy in Beijing

We were slow to catch up with this and didn’t recognize what China was doing until very recently. But now the US is making up for lost time and has already briefed 40 other nations on what it knows about China’s aerial surveillance efforts. The Washington Post reports some of the information that was shared. These briefings.

The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated forseveral years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to several U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Officials claim that these surveillance airships were spotted on five continents and operated by the PLA air force.

“What the Chinese have done is taken an unbelievably old technology, and basically married it with modern communications and observation capabilities” to try to glean intelligence on other nations’ militaries, said one official. “It’s a massive effort.”…

Separately U.S. officials started to share information with Japanese officials, whose military installations were targeted by Beijing.

“There has been great interest in this on the part of our allies and partners,” According to a senior administration official.

One nice touch which I’m sure was intended to infuriate and further humiliate the Chinese is that the briefings took place in two locations, Washington DC and Beijing.

A senior official from the administration and diplomats stated that briefings were held in Washington and Beijing by the United States about the Chinese spy ball that Washington had shot down over U.S. territory on Saturday.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman on Monday briefed nearly 150 foreign diplomats across 40 embassies, the official said, while in Beijing the U.S. embassy gathered foreign diplomats on Monday and Tuesday to present U.S. findings about the balloon…

In the briefings in Beijing, the United States presented information to demonstrate that the balloon, which entered U.S. airspace in the last days of January and flew over U.S. military sites, was not a weather research balloon as Beijing said but an airship that was used for espionage, said diplomats in Beijing who attended the discussions…

Beijing briefing participants said that they were informed that the balloon was powered by solar panels and that it did not follow natural wind patterns. According to U.S. officials, the balloon was equipped rudders as well propellers.

That decision was amazing. I seriously think that the person who thought up the idea of briefing foreign diplomats about the spy satellite at the US Embassy Beijing needs a raise or promotion. This all shows that China is lying about the weather balloon being in Beijing, adding insult to injury. This incident.

Briefings by the State Department to foreign officials were intended to demonstrate that the balloons can be used for intelligence gathering. The Chinese military has been doing this for years and targeting the territories of Japan and Taiwan as well as India and the Philippines. U.S. diplomats seek to prove to other governments that China’s methods are violating the sovereign airspace of numerous countries, even as Chinese officials continue to insist that the two balloons seen last week over the United States and Latin America were innocent civilian machines.

“China has taken a ham-fisted approach to public information management,” Jude Blanchette, a China scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Washington, said this. “The moment they issued the statement of regret, they should have stopped there. Their lies that this was a civilian weather balloon made things worse.”

The state media seems to be downplaying the issue, which is a sign that China is embarrassed by it all. There have only been a handful of stories about it on People’s Daily in the past week and none of them are on the Front page today. The state media would rather discuss something else.

CNN caught a great catch Monday. A recent Chinese documentary covered the downing of another country’s spy balloon by a Chinse fighter pilot, treating the incident as a heroic act. “China’s air force has crushed the enemy in a heroic move,” The documentary declared. Needless to say, that’s not at all how they treated the US decision to shoot down Their Spy balloon

China’s state media broadcast a documentary about how its air force shot down a spy balloon of another country in a heroic move
Ironic Beijing claimed that the US shot down its balloon in violation of international practice
State media revealed that the media was primarily focused on balloon developments for a while @cnn pic.twitter.com/RtUkz5ggFY

— Selina Wang (@selinawangtv) February 7, 2023