On Monday, Chinese officials said that the U.S. has flown more than 10 high-altitude balloons into China’s airspace over the last year without the country’s permission. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a Monday briefing that “It is also common for US balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries. Since last year, US high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of Chinese authorities.”
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Wang said the US should “first reflect on itself and change course, rather than smear and instigate a confrontation.”
The U.S responded by completely denying the allegations, as US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “Any claim that the U.S. government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is false. It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, connected to the People’s Liberation Army, that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the United States and over 40 countries across five continents.”
“This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control. It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the United States was a weather balloon and to this day has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace and the airspace of others.”
The Chinese claim was also dismissed by National Security Council (NSC) Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby during an interview with NBC. “Not true. Not doing it. Just absolutely not true. We are not flying balloons over China,” said Kirby.
