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The balloon soap opera continues to fuel tension between Washington and Beijing. This Monday, it is China’s turn to accuse the United States of having “illegally” flown balloons in its airspace. The White House denied these claims.
With our correspondent in Beijing, Stéphane Lagarde
Chinese diplomacy has not provided any evidence in support of their accusations, but the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is formal. “It is common for American balloons to illegally enter other countries’ airspace,” Wang Wembin told reporters Monday afternoon. “Just counting from last year, American high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over Chinese airspace more than 10 times without the approval of the competent Chinese authorities,” he said.
Alert near Rizhao Port
The remarks come a day after an alert about an unidentified flying object sighted near the port of Rizhao, on the country’s eastern coast. Authorities in Shandong province said they were “preparing to take it down”, sparking some buzz online.
Since then there has been no news, but the saga of the balloons is closely followed by users on the Internet. The statements this afternoon topped the list of topics consulted on search engines. “For a long time, the United States has abused its own technological advantages to carry out large-scale and indiscriminate wiretapping (…) even of its allies,” added the senior diplomat, who also referred to the 657 times that US warships and planes were sent to conduct close reconnaissances of China last year.
Washington denial
For its part, the White House on Monday denied allegations by Beijing that the United States has been sending balloons over China for surveillance purposes.
“Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the People’s Republic of China is false,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said on her Twitter account, adding that it is Beijing “that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence gathering”.
