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Chinese "weather" ballon

 For some reason, the Chinese military launched a spy balloon as Blinken was about the leave for discussions with Xi.

It should be noted that this is not the first time a Chinese "weather" balloon has overflown the US territory, it seems that it happened a few times during the time of Trump, and at that time the US government decided to do nothing.  The ballon was very large, around 100 meters in diameter and the payload was the size of a school bus, with lots of antennae and solar panels it could also be guided since it had some propellers to direct it (to some extent).

The story that is being repeated is that not unlike many governments the right hand and the left hand are not talking to each other, so the military decided, probably because of certain airflows at altitude at this time of the year that February would be a good time to deploy a sophisticated surveillance platform.  Now, where things get bad is that once the US government started to want to talk to the Chinese government no one was willing to have a discussion with the Americans.  Strange 

The Chinese are in a strange place right now, with probably the strongest cult of personality under Xi that has ever existed, the removal of Hu Jintao, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, now an elder statsman during the plenary session was unheard of, ever, it was a symbol of the power of Xi.  If the stories are true, and it's hard to be sure with all the disinformation that occurs in these exalted circles, is that Xi doesn't like bad news, and has removed several bearers of bad news -- even if they had nothing to do with the negative information.  So, as the story goes, Xi doesn't hear bad information.

I guess this was done for domestic consumption, but the Chinese insisted that it was a weather balloon and that it wandered over many of the US strategic assets was just a "coincidence".  The Politbureau spokesperson used a variety of reasons for the balloon, eventually saying that the US was also using balloons to spy of China.  Although first denying that it was a spy-balloonThe high-altitude images showed that this was nothing like a weather balloon.  It made the Chinese media look foolish.  Also, I would like to think that if the Americans were using spy-balloon they would not use a white balloon to make it a little less obvious.  Still not a win for the Chinese

The Americans waited for the ballon to leave its land mass before destroying it, and that's because taking down such a large instrument (the size of a bus) could lead to death and destruction on the ground, furthermore that the balloon fell into the ocean allowed the US to recover the device in shallow waters, it will give the US government a good understanding of US made equipment that is now being deployed for military use.

Overall, the Chinese got, probably little information since the US could see the balloon come miles away, US-China relations are now near frozen, and the US now knows which US company has been selling equipment that is being used in Chinese military hardware.

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