“China expresses resolute opposition and strong protest toward the incident on behalf of the Chinese government,” Xie said on Monday.
Who,you might ask? Exactly. The seniority of Xie’s position not the content of his message carries the best signal of how Beijing is handling this fiasco.
A day earlier China’s Foreign Ministry had conveyed its “serious concerns” about the incident to Washington. “Serious concerns” is the diplomatic parallel of a tut-tut,just one notch above “solemn representations”. But the demarcation allows Beijing to engage in a performative outrage that moves in a cycle and maintains its baseline narrative of China against the West.
In playing up the rhetoric while playing down the personnel,the Foreign Ministry has fuelled its nationalistic domestic audience while avoiding escalating the situation with the US.
The timeline of events shows the US was also at pains to avoid bringing the balloon to the public’s attention. Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Washington was aware the balloon was in US airspace as early as January 28,six days before it went public,and four days before Chase Doak,a local photographer in Montana spotted it hovering over his property in the western state.