The Daily - A Chinese Balloon and a Diplomatic Showdown

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

On Wednesday, residents in Montana saw a mysterious object — a balloon — hovering and bobbing around in the skies. The enigma brought Americans out to squint at the heavens, caused a diplomatic visit to be canceled and opened a political debate.How did a balloon end up kindling such tension between Washington and Beijing?Guest: Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The Chinese balloon drifted for seven days across the United States. Here’s a timeline of events.The balloon was brought down by an air-to-air missile fired at it off the coast of South Carolina.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Over the past week, an object of curiosity in the sky over Montana turned into a crisis between the U.S. and China. Today, my colleague Edward Wong on how a balloon could trigger such a high-stakes showdown and what it says about the relationship between the world's two superpowers that it did. It's Monday, February 6th. Ed, tell us the saga of this Chinese balloon. Well, I think it first started on Wednesday.

That's the moon. Well, what the heck is that? Residents in Montana looked up in the sky and saw this mysterious object. What planet is that? I have no idea what it is. It's been there stationary for about the last 35 minutes. That's not the sun. What the heck is that?

It was hovering. It was bobbing around. It did look like a balloon, but it also looked like maybe a planet, a star. And then another mysterious thing happened on Wednesday. I am sitting in my driveway here in Billings, Montana. There is a ground stop on our airport. The authorities shut down the airport around Billings, Montana for three hours. And then that really set people speculating about what exactly was going on in the sky above their heads. And could they tell what it was with the naked eye?

It was hard to tell with the naked eye, but some photographers started zooming in on it. And once you looked at those magnified images, it became much more apparent that it was a balloon, this round object. And there was this darker part of it on its underbelly that seemed like a carriage of some sort that was housing solar panels, surveillance equipment. These people who were capturing these images started posting something on social media. So word was starting to spread around around at least the residents of Montana. And then the next afternoon on Thursday, NBC News broke the story that the object in the sky above Montana that all these people have been looking at, that they've been taking photos of, was actually a Chinese spy balloon. And the Pentagon held a briefing very shortly after that to confirm that news and to say that they were monitoring it and trying to decide what to do about it. So China had been caught spying on the U.S.? That's right. China had sent up this balloon at some point. It spent days drifting across the northwest of the U.S. through Alaska and Canada and then arrived in Montana.

And what was the significance of Montana, Ed? Well, the Pentagon and U.S. officials were very concerned that this balloon was above Montana because it houses 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads in large silos. And we don't know for sure, but the fact that the balloon drifted over Montana could have been an effort by Chinese officials to collect information on these missile silos. Okay, but countries spy on each other, right? U.S. spies on China, China spies on the U.S. Why make such a big deal of it now? U.S. officials have told us that this has happened before. The Pentagon came out and said that it's

happened three times during the Trump administration, one time early in the Biden administration, and that in each instance, they had appeared briefly in the U.S. or over the continental U.S. and then drifted away. This time, it was different because the balloon lingered much longer than in the previous episodes. Okay, so the balloon's up there in the air. The Pentagon knows about it. What do they decide to do about it? Well, the Pentagon officials are looking at this object, and they realize it's a huge machine. Just to undercarriage itself, the part that has the solar panels and the surveillance equipment is the size of three school buses. And then the round part of the balloon is even larger than that.

So there was talk about possibly shooting down the balloon. But Pentagon leaders eventually decided that that could cause damage on the ground. The debris raining down might hit people. It might hit buildings. on the ground. The debris raining down might hit people, it might hit buildings. So they decided to hold off on that and track the progress of the balloon to find a spot at which they could bring it down. So basically, they leave it in the air. They leave it in the air and they use various devices and also deploy jets to keep an eye on it. So the U.S. says this is basically China spying on the U.S. How does China respond? What do they say it is? At first, China does acknowledge that this event

took place. But then they do come out with a statement from the foreign ministry. And it says that China did send up an aerial surveillance device into the sky and that it arrived in the U.S. surveillance device into the sky and that it arrived in the U.S. They say that this device was used for gathering research on weather. That was a weather research balloon. And they also say that it was an innocent civilian device and that they had no intention of sending it to the U.S. It went off course, according to their statement. And what does the U.S. government say about that? Does it believe it? Pentagon officials insist that their own research on the machine shows that it was an intelligence gathering device of a national security nature, not something innocent being used for monitoring

weather. But there was a very unusual part of the Chinese statement, and that was a line expressing regret for what happened. And that's very rare for China to say that. They oftentimes don't acknowledge that an unusual incident took place. And very rarely do they express any hint at an apology or any sort of regret for what happened. What was behind that? What was behind that very unusual gesture from the Chinese? Well, the really critical thing to understand here is the timing of the appearance of this balloon. It showed up in the U.S. in the lead up to this important diplomatic

meeting that was set to take place in Beijing between U.S. and Chinese officials. The U.S. Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, was supposed to get on a plane on Friday night and land in Beijing on Sunday, where he was going to meet with President Xi Jinping of China. And this was the first time since 2018 that a U.S. Secretary of State was planning to visit China. But the balloon put the trip in jeopardy. It appeared that China was putting out this apologetic-sounding statement in an attempt to salvage it. But that wasn't enough. Jin, if you'll allow me, I'd just like to briefly address the presence of the Chinese surveillance balloon in U.S. airspace.

On Friday afternoon, we listened as Secretary Blinken gave a press conference where he said that the Chinese spy balloon was an irresponsible act on the part of the Chinese government. The presence of this surveillance balloon in U.S. airspace is a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law. That the balloon violated U.S. sovereignty and that the trip was off for now. In the meantime, the United States will continue to maintain open lines of communication with China, including to address this ongoing incident. So all this business with the balloon got

pretty serious in the end. It's now a diplomatic crisis. Yeah, it was a big deal that the trip was canceled. The leaders have been planning this for months. But once the Chinese spy balloon became public, then this trip became a much more politically sensitive topic. Well, first, this has been a tremendous embarrassment for the United States of America. a tremendous embarrassment for the United States of America. Republican lawmakers and politicians had started bashing Biden for not taking harder action against the balloon, maybe shooting it down immediately.

They could have shot this thing down well before it was over Montana. I mean, they could have shot this thing down before it hit the, you know, the coast of Alaska. And also taking harder action on China for sending the balloon in the first place. Well, he needs to address it directly, take it seriously. I think he believes it's like a Taylor Swift concert moving across America, some kind of a tour. This is not the Chinese spy balloon tour. He needs to address it head on and not just kind of brush it off.

And the Biden administration is very sensitive to how its China policies appear to the public. It wants to appear sufficiently hawkish on China, as do Republican leaders. Each side wants to appear more hawkish than the other on China. So, Ed, this balloon seems to have caused quite a bit of diplomatic damage. Remind us, what is its fate in the end? So the balloon kept drifting for a couple days over to the southeastern U.S., pushed by the winds, and ended up off the coast of South Carolina. And then on Saturday, the Pentagon sent a couple F-22 fighter jets up into the sky. They just shot it.

They did? Yep, they just blew it up. into the sky. They just shot us. They did? Yep, they just blew it up. See the balloon falling? And shot down the balloon with a single missile. And while the story of the balloon had ended there in those waters off South Carolina, this whole episode shows how fragile and how sensitive relations between the two worlds' major superpowers had become. We'll be right back. be right back. Okay, so Ed, this balloon scuttles this really important diplomatic mission,

and that really reveals the tensions in this relationship between U.S. and China. So remind us of that backstory. Why had it gotten so bad? U.S.-China relations are at one of the worst points in decades, and it's been getting worse for years now. Soon after President Xi took office in 2012, U.S. officials realized that he was taking China in a much more autocratic direction. He was taking repressive actions against the ethnic Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. He was taking hardline actions against people in Hong Kong, and he was also pushing his military to be much more adventurous in the territories around China. That included in the Indian Himalayas, in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, and also across the Taiwan Strait. And as you know, Taiwan is the most sensitive issue between the U.S. and China.

And remind us why Taiwan in particular? Why is it the most sensitive issue here? Well, when the Communist Party took over China in 1949, the people who opposed them fled to Taiwan and set up a government in exile there. And since then, the U.S. has pledged support to Taiwan, which is a democratic island. It has said that it will give Taiwan weapons of the defense of nature to protect itself in the event of an invasion by China. But in Beijing, the Communist Party says that Taiwan is part of its territory. It's not an independent nation and that it will take Taiwan by force if Taiwan doesn't agree at some point to reunite with mainland China.

You know who's getting the oil? China. China is ripping us off. In the Trump administration, national security officials took a much more confrontational stand toward China, and Taiwan was one of the big issues that they focused on. On Friday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that America's one China policy, of course, it officially recognizes Beijing's government, but not Taiwan's. He said that policy, one China, is negotiable. They started talking about whether China might try and invade Taiwan imminently.

And they also started to try and expand the diplomatic space between the U.S. and Taiwan. And what about in the Biden administration? During the Biden administration, talk in Washington of a potential invasion of Taiwan by China accelerated. And they started looking at all this against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They thought that if Russia would invade Ukraine without any regard for the existing world order, then China might do the same thing with Taiwan. Right. After Russia invades Ukraine, suddenly Taiwan takes on a whole new significance. Exactly. And President Biden himself has strong views on Taiwan. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that? Yes.

You are? That's a commitment we made. He said four times now that the U.S. military will defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, which is different than what other recent American presidents have said. U.S. officials say there hasn't been change to U.S. policy on Taiwan, and they don't want to explicitly say that the U.S. will defend Taiwan. But Biden has been very out there saying that. And congressional leaders have their own strong points of view on Taiwan.

This morning, the meeting China did not want to happen. Last August, Speaker Pelosi made a visit to Taiwan, the first by House speakers since the 1990s. Nancy Pelosi has said America will never abandon the island during a trip that's been condemned as a major provocation by China. And it caused tensions between U.S. and China to spike. China had been asking the Biden administration to prevent her from going. And then after she did go, it started sending more planes across the Taiwan Strait, and it began lobbying missiles around Taiwan. And at least five of those even landed in the

waters near Japan. Okay, so the tensions are extremely high. Taiwan is at the center of it. And the Biden administration is genuinely worried that there could actually be some military confrontation. What does the U.S. do? During the Biden administration, Pentagon officials and other national security officials have been trying to build up their military alliances and partnerships all across Asia. So, for example, it's been building up a partnership with Australia and Britain, and it's agreed to give nuclear submarine technology to Australia, which is a big deal. And China sees that as a huge move against the Chinese military. The Biden administration has also said that it supports Japan in revitalizing its military and moving away from its pacifist stand and having Japan have a strong military that can be deployed in other parts of Asia.

And just last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, on a visit to the Philippines, announced that the U.S. military would have greater access to as many as nine different military bases across that island chain. The U.S. military has had a small presence in the Philippines, but this would give it a much greater presence across the entire country, including at some sites that are very close to Taiwan. And Pentagon officials say that they could put equipment at these different sites as well as troops and the presence would be temporary, but it would still put the U.S. in a much stronger position if there was a confrontation with China at some point. Okay, so there's this rising tension over Taiwan that's spilling over into worries about a potential military confrontation. What else is going on here? Well, one big change that's taking place in the relationship is that national security

issues have bled into economic issues now. These are the two largest economies in the world, and they've always had a robust trade relationship. And a lot of people saw those trade ties as the platform for stability in the relationship. trade ties as the platform for stability in the relationship. That still happens, but now there's very sensitive sectors that U.S. officials want to decouple from China. And what's an example, Ed? The biggest recent example is semiconductors. And these are these small chips that are used in everything from our household appliances, like the refrigerators in your kitchen, to weapons that the military uses for the most advanced forms of warfare. They were basically what make the world run at this point.

And the U.S. now sees China as a very big rival in innovating semiconductors, and it wants to keep it from being able to advance this technology. The future of the chip industry is going to be made in America. Made in America. Biden administration officials have said that this is a foundational technology and that it's not good enough for the U.S. to just keep a few paces ahead of China on this. They have to prevent China from being able to innovate this type of sector and this type of industry. China has become more aggressive in what they call their military-civil

fusion strategy, which is buying our sophisticated chips, which are supposedly for commercial purposes, and putting them into military equipment to advance their military. And we're not going to stand for that. Last October, the Biden administration took a very aggressive and ambitious step on this. They announced that they would prevent U.S. companies from exporting certain types of semiconductor chips to China. And they also said U.S. companies could not export certain types of semiconductor manufacturing technology to China. In that sense, they were trying to prevent China from being able to use tools to make its own advanced chips. And the U.S. has also been in talks with allies, the Netherlands and Japan, which both have critical

semiconductor tool technology, to try and keep those countries and the companies there from exporting their own manufacturing equipment to China. Okay, so the tensions really had been rising both militarily but also economically. So given that, what was the goal for the meeting that Blinken was supposed to have been on? Well, with tensions so high between the two countries, both sides were looking at this meeting as a way to bring the temperature down on this confrontational stand that both countries were taking against each other. And that attitude was adopted by both President Biden and President Xi when they met in Bali

last November. You and I have had a number of candid and useful conversations over the years and since I became president as well. You're kind enough to call me to congratulate me and I congratulate you as well. And I believe there's a little substitute, though, to face-to-face discussions. The two met there on the sidelines of a summit of major world leaders and agreed that the top U.S. diplomat, Tony Blinken, should make a trip to China. Officials on the two sides spent months planning for this meeting. And the stakes were much higher for China.

Why? Well, China had been in this very strict lockdown for three years during COVID. Presidency had not been present on the world stage. And other countries were questioning its diplomatic engagement. Its economy was suffering and was trying to grapple with that slowdown. And tensions with the greatest superpower in the world have been rising throughout this

entire time. So China realized it had to defuse some of those tensions. And this trip by Tony Blinken was seen as a big symbolic step in re-engagement to a certain degree with the U.S. and making sure that there were guardrails on the relationship. And what about the U.S.? How were they seeing this meeting? Well, what I was hearing from U.S. officials was that they didn't have big expectations that there would be major announcements coming out of this meeting. They didn't have big agreements lined up.

But they did see this as an important opportunity to keep channels of communication at the very top levels open. They figured that if there's some sort of accidental military conflict that occurs in Asia, or if there's some other confrontation between the U.S. and China, they need to make sure that the leaders of both countries can talk to each other and diffuse attentions. So they were trying to get diplomacy working again, basically, kind of cranking it back into gear to avoid having a complete breakdown if something small happens. For example, a spy balloon floating above the U.S. Right. The ironic thing is that the exact type of episode that they feared would happen and lead to a break in communications between two countries is what happened in the case of the spy balloon. This incident that took

place actually led to this break in the trip. And the thing that they were trying to establish with the trip fell apart because of that. Right. So the point of the trip was to make it so that something so small as a balloon wouldn't derail the relationship. And in fact, it did because they hadn't had the trip. Exactly. Okay, so if this meeting is so important to China, you know, it's something that they really wanted to happen, why send a spy balloon exactly at this moment? It does seem like this was an own goal by China, a sabotaging of something they really wanted by parts of their own system. sabotaging of something they really wanted by parts of their own system.

And there are some people who speculate that maybe more hawkish elements in their system, possibly in the military, wanted to send this over to the U.S. to embarrass Biden and Blinken on the eve of Blinken's trip to China. But I think there's a more plausible explanation, and that's that there's incompetence in the system. And the officials who sent up the balloon didn't realize where the balloon would end up or at what time it would end up in the U.S. And that it would result in the scuttling of this important diplomatic trip that President Xi and his aides really wanted to happen. So essentially, there's a reasonable chance that China just kind of messed this up here. I mean, as you say, own goal. Like, it lost out on this diplomatic chance that it really wanted because potentially it just lost track of this thing. I think what this shows is that it's very difficult in this relationship

for each country to read the intentions of the other one. Right now, U.S. officials are trying to look back at this episode and figure out what exactly happened. Why did China send up this balloon? Could it do something like this in the as small as a spy balloon, can take place on the eve of a diplomatic trip and lead to these greater tensions between the world's two great superpowers. Right, like fundamentally, what does it say about the relationship between the United States and China that one little balloon can derail this major act of diplomacy. I think both governments hope that their relationship can reach a place where an event like this can be something that can be discussed, talked about, and diplomats can move

forward and conduct business. But right now, where things stand, it's hard to see that happening. And I think U.S. officials and Chinese officials are braced for many more incidents like this. Ed, thank you. Thanks, Sabrina. It's always great to hear from you. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee approved a primary process that starts the 2024 Democratic presidential circuit in South Carolina, the state that resuscitated President Joe Biden's once-flailing candidacy. For years, the party's contests have begun with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. But the party wanted a calendar that better reflects its own racial diversity and the diversity of the country.

South Carolina will be followed by New Hampshire and Nevada, then Georgia, and then Michigan. And on Monday, two powerful earthquakes struck Turkey, knocking down buildings and killing more than 1,600 people, raising the specter of a new humanitarian disaster in a region already wracked by war. raising the specter of a new humanitarian disaster in a region already wracked by war. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit at 4.17 a.m. local time and was centered about 20 miles from Gaziantep, a Turkish provincial capital near the border with Syria. It was felt as far away as Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. A second earthquake hit nine hours later on Monday afternoon.

Residents and rescue workers on both sides of the border, in multiple cities, scrambled to look for survivors. Hundreds were believed to be trapped under the rubble, and the toll was expected to rise. Today's episode was produced by Will Reed and Rochelle Banja, with help from Shannon Lin. It was edited by Mark George, with help from MJ Davis Lin and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you tomorrow.