One of the most ridiculous claims by the American state/media in recent history concerns the “China spy balloon”, which was shot down off the SC coast on Saturday, February 4. Almost everyone seemed to unite in the prior few days, conservative and liberal, to put on their “China bad” hat and foment panic. “Look how brazenly bad they are, they’re SpYiNg on us!” Except that this assertion is ridiculous. The Pentagon has even confirmed that there is no possibility of this: “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”. China (just like the US) has plenty of discrete technology at their disposal to spy on someone if they wanted to. Why would someone with this ability use a giant, very obvious balloon the size of “three buses” to do so??? It's completely devoid of logic. The balloon’s utility lies in civilian meteorological analysis beyond a reasonable doubt, not foreign surveillance. The balloon likely drifted off course into American territory from China via a wind pattern.
The mainstream response to the situation screams, “It’s okay when we [U.S.] do it, but not when you [China] do it.” The US state has spied and will continue to spy on other countries that don’t fit within its hegemony. Not just spy, but sabotage, interfere in democratic elections, assassinate, and engage in mass civilian murder. For comparison on foreign interference and violence, the US has over 750 military bases abroad, China has four.
This should not be interpreted as a defense of China. I am fully aware of the issues associated with contemporary China. However, I am warning of the dangers of nationalistic hysteria and war-mongering. Antagonistic actors like the military industrial complex here in the States would love nothing more than to start some sort of war with somewhere like China, because they directly profit from selling weapons to combatants. Also, this story is a distraction from real issues. Corporate media actively chose this absurd story for “news” instead of anything else that is actually newsworthy, the domestic housing crisis, for example.
Needless to say, this event has created additional fractures in the China-U.S. diplomatic relationship. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has cancelled the upcoming trip to Beijing in the wake of the balloon scandal, which would have been the first American diplomatic visit to the Chinese capital since 2018. We may see a more strained relationship between the two nations as American power, which has been overwhelmingly dominant worldwide since the aftermath of World War II, declines relative to China and the U.S. becomes increasingly belligerent in an effort to retain its formerly unopposed hegemony.
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