It seems we were pretty slow on the uptake with this, not recognizing what China was doing until fairly 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 on some of what was shared at those 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 have said these surveillance airships, operated in part by the PLA air force, have been spotted over five continents.

“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 have begun to share specifics with officials in countries such as Japan whose military facilities were targeted by Beijing.

“There has been great interest in this on the part of our allies and partners,” said 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.

The United States held briefings in Washington and Beijing with foreign diplomats from 40 nations about the Chinese spy balloon that Washington shot down on Saturday for spying over U.S. territory, a senior administration official and diplomats said on Tuesday.

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…

The diplomats at the Beijing briefing said they were told that the solar panels on the balloon meant that it needed more power than a weather balloon, and that its flight path did not conform with natural wind patterns. U.S. officials have said the balloon was equipped with rudders and propellers.

I could not love that decision any more. Seriously, whoever came up with the idea of briefing foreign diplomats on the spy balloon at the US Embassy in Beijing deserves a raise or a promotion or maybe both. The takeaway from all of this is that China is clearly lying about this being a weather balloon which only adds to the humiliation of this incident.

The State Department briefings to foreign officials are designed to show that the balloons are equipped for intelligence gathering and that the Chinese military has been doing it for years, targeting, among other sites, the territories of Japan, Taiwan, 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,” said Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “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.”

One sign that China is deeply embarrassed about the whole thing is that state media appears to be downplaying it. 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. State media would clearly rather talk about something else.

Finally, CNN made a good 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 state media aired documentary not long ago about its air force downing another country's spy balloon in a heroic move
Ironic Beijing accused US shooting down its balloon as violating int'l practice
State media shows it's been focused on balloon development for a while @cnn pic.twitter.com/RtUkz5ggFY

— Selina Wang (@selinawangtv) February 7, 2023