The Chinese have baffled the world by going back several centuries in espionage techniques. They have once again used the globe to find out what was and was happening on earth at a time when the airspaces are crisscrossed with satellites of different nationalities, drones, planes, ships that come and go through the stratosphere and possibly, although it is not officially confirmed by NASA, from UFOs of mysterious and disturbing origin.
Chinese balloons, according to confusing published information, have been floating above the earth for some time. The one that was shot down over the Atlantic had been on American soil for several days and, according to the Pentagon, stopped for many hours over Montana, near the city of Great Falls, where intercontinental ballistic missiles operate and park. The great white ball entered through Alaska, crossed Canada and after flying over the United States for four days, the winds pushed it towards the Atlantic, where two military planes shot it down on the express orders of President Biden.
It was not a minor incident because the presence of the Chinese balloon in the American skies had an immediate political effect. The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, suspended an official visit to Beijing, long planned, considering that the balloon was an interference by the Chinese Government that threatened national security.
The crisis mechanisms between the two powers were launched and while Washington spoke of an espionage operation, Beijing was referring to a ship that collected meteorological data from which it lost control due to unforeseen atmospheric phenomena. In full ambiguity of information, it was spread that there was another device flying over Central America and that during the Trump presidency several Chinese balloons had crossed the American skies.
The Chinese balloon acquired a political dimension precisely at the moment when Donald Trump released from his social media platform, in capital letters, that they bring down the balloon. The Trumpist Republicans raised the alarm about national security and Biden waited two days until the blowing up of the balloon did not damage lives and property on American soil.
The episode may indicate a Chinese pretext for postponing the reunion between Xi Jinping and Biden after the Bali summit last November. It is also surprising that a technological power like China, with 400,000 engineers graduating each year, resorts to the globe to collect sensitive data from the US military industry. Perhaps these are balloons with a greater precision capacity than the most sophisticated satellites.
The speculations are many and the data officially confirmed by the enigmatic balloon leave many gaps in the panorama of the tense relations between China and the United States. It could be a diversionary maneuver from the Confucian wisdom that has inspired the Chinese for twenty-five centuries.
The axis of global confrontation is now in the war in Ukraine, but where the economic and scientific battles of this century are going to be fought will be in the Pacific, between the United States and China, with Taiwan as a pretext to justify a conflict of territorial sovereignty but of dimensions of control of global hegemony.
