WASHINGTON China on Sunday protested against Washingtons decision to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over North America, accusing the United States of overreacting and warning that it reserves the right to take retaliatory measures.
China expresses its dissatisfaction and protest against the US use of force to attack the unmanned civilian airship, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
Washingtons actions showed it was obviously overreacting and seriously violating international practice, the ministry added.
Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Tan Kefei said in a separate statement that Beijing reserves the right to use the necessary means to deal with similar situations, without elaborating.
The shooting down of the suspected spy balloon, off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, has highlighted how relations between the two superpowers can be held hostage to domestic politics in the US, said Chinese analysts.
Professor Zhu Feng, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Nanjing University, said what should have been a technical issue had become a high-level issue of security confrontation between China and the US.
This should serve as a reminder to Chinese and American leaders that in order to have a stable and manageable Sino-US relationship, emotional domestic politics must be kept at a distance, otherwise the bilateral relationship will only get worse, he added.
Mr Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of state-run tabloid Global Times and a commentator known for his nationalistic views, said the manner in which the politicians in the US had stirred up American public opinion with the incident meant that shooting down the balloon was the only way that it could be brought to a conclusion.
The balloon, first spotted earlier last week loitering over Montana, has been shot down by an F-22 fighter jet using an air-to-air missile, according to US military officials. Remote video URL Beijing has rejected allegations that the balloon was meant for espionage, saying instead that it was an unmanned civilian airship intended to monitor the weather.
The incident scuppered an impending visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, with Washington saying it would not be appropriate to travel to Beijing for meetings at this time.
Experts had hoped that Mr Blinkens visit who would have been the most senior US diplomat to travel to Beijing since 2018 would put a floor under the bilateral relationship and prevent ties from deteriorating further.
Chinese analysts said the US response was an escalation, pointing out that it showed how anti-China sentiments in the US political establishment were proving to be the biggest impediment to the improvement of ties.
The incident, which was closely watched on social media by netizens in both countries, also showed that public opinion in both countries was becoming more inflammable, making the future more bleak, said Professor Shi Yinhong, director of Centre on American Studies at the Renmin University of China Embed Twitter Tweet URL Writing on Weibo, Mr Hu said the shooting down of the balloon showed that the US was incapable of dealing with the incident in a practical manner, and must politicise it.
China is dealing with a US that does not need to drink to get drunk, its internal (political) strife is constantly generating hostilities that spill over to the international stage, he said. More On This Topic US postpones Blinken trip to China over spy balloon incident The 7 days before suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down in the Atlantic: A timeline
