oh, puleeze
indignation and the balloon
Beijing’s indignation regarding the balloon they rather clumsily deployed over the United States serves several purposes.
It is a manifestation of China’s demands for respect and equality on the international stage. China has the capability to create and deploy balloons, a level of development earning the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led country respect as a power. A party immeasurably touchy about everything expects kudos wherever it can. The nation will view their work largely through the lens of the arguments the leadership puts forth rather than as a reflection of global criticisms. It is hard to overstate the Party’s ultimate goal is not to use any intelligence on weather, agricultural acreage, or any sort but to retain power in China. The CCP does everything in that light and one must recall that. The Party fears losing its perch atop the nation far more than anything else.
The CCP does like to collect intelligence; make no mistake about that. The information it holds through the ‘social credit system’ or the monitoring of any individual’s actions on the street is breathtaking. Individualism as a mode for society, much less respecting individual rights, never ranks as high as the maintenance of public order and societal predictability. Preventing luan, or chaos, is as central to China’s cultural norms as the right to guns in the U.S. version. But the balloon likely would not collect massive intelligence unavailable through various other methods in an open, democratic society. Repeating in other words: China spies on a pretty open society already but this approach is just an additional way to do so with probably lower yield than some options.
China is defensive about its actions, as it does not like being caught in behaviours leading to condemnation. Most, if not all governments, prefer not drawing attention to their actions leaving them vulnerable to criticism. I am not sure this is even noteworthy.
Additionally, Xi Jinping has already shown just over the past three months that perhaps he is not quite as perfect in his decision-making as he wanted his nation to believe.
It’s China’s reaction to the criticism that will go over the top. The Foreign Ministry, which is more of an office modelled on western-style regimes rather than a powerful organisation within the CCP or the Party, has already blustered about violating China’s sovereignty (while merely hinting China regrets the error in the balloon somehow drifting somewhere it wasn’t meant to go into U.S. airspace. Notice the passiveness here.) by shooting down something the Chinese people sent up. Before long we will probably hear that the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese people were hurt when the United States aggressively attacked this balloon.
The Foreign Ministry did also threaten that it could respond in kind. This one matters as it likely is a serious warning. The United States certainly flies surveillance missions, usually airplanes rather than white balloons, which could indeed fly into Chinese airspace. We should all recall that the April 2001 encounter involving a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter and a U.S. EP-3 surveillance aircraft resulting in the Chinese pilot’s death and a couple of weeks’ dicey negotiations to free the U.S. crew being held on Hainan Island. In that incident, the U.S. position was that its crew was over international waters rather than Beijing’s claim the event occurred in China’s airspace. The point is that China likely will feel considerably more inclined to respond similarly with a shootdown after this incident yesterday.
The CCP’s fury, as occurred in 1996 over the Taiwan Strait crisis, is that they could not unilaterally alter the course of events once they started. The protestations are largely theatric, thus disingenuous. China realised that it had no way to prevent President Clinton from sending two carrier battle groups to the area around the Taiwan Strait when Beijing harrassed the island in the midst of its election. That sense of futility is often seen as a primary motivator for the PLA’s modernisation process.
On the opposite side, the voices savaging the Biden administration for allowing this to drag on before acting sooner are also howling largely for domestic consumption. While I cannot predict a weather balloon shot down over the Ozarks would not have hit people on the ground, the Biden White House says they feared destroying the balloon could have caused injuries on the ground, hence a delay in shooting it down. I don’t know about that but I can cite indicatations the Chinese sent at least three earlier balloons which President Trump chose not to shoot down during his administration.1
Using the military instrument of power leads to an escalation regardless of the international situation. Biden may have been worried about ground fatalities or something else. The immediate tendency to leap onto the administration is partisan and an enduring feature of critics of any White House at present. There well might have been voices within the Defense Department arguing to allow the balloon to transit the entire west to east coast path to see how China reacted to growing the global spotlight for this curiosity. Hard to know but the idea that one administration would have acted so much more decisively strikes me as highly unlikely. No president of the United States takes the lives of our citizens lightly. They just do not. Nor do they usually entirely ignore the military’s concerns, although I suppose it possible.
Instead, it’s probable the United States preferred not to call attention to its own surveillance or spying over the Middle Kingdom which I assume is happening regularly. I have no idea whether it is or not but I do know that, as the incomparable Carl von Clausewitz states, “By ‘intelligence’ we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country—the basis, in short of our own plans and operations”. Does anyone seriously believe, in this era of massive concern about China’s military modernisation as well as its aspirations, that we are not monitoring that country with a panoply of instruments? It’s arguably far safer to not draw attention to one’s own activities by making such noises about the adversary.
In the end, Biden ordered the balloon downed. Beijing is unhappy yet freed to go on to some other topic. Washington now plays the parlour game as to when and why not. Pundits opine. The public sees further evidence of reasons to mistrust what a state calling itself a great power but acting like insecure teenagers. Finally, the indignation machine goes full bore, until the next crisis spins it up again. We most definitely are in an action-reaction cycle, I fear.FIN
Stephen Neukam, ‘Chinese balloons flew over US three times during Trump administration’, TheHill.com, 5 February 2023, retrieved at https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3844511-chinese-balloons-flew-over-us-three-times-during-trump-administration-officials/