Balloon should not derail ties, diplomat says

Episode seen as underlining the need for China and US to keep on talking

Relations between China and the United States should not be led astray by a "wandering balloon", a senior Chinese envoy has said in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

The shooting down of an unmanned civilian Chinese airship by a US missile on Feb 4 has further strained the relationship between China and the US, which described the airship as a "spy balloon".

In the past few weeks, the balloon's entry into US airspace and the US handling of the matter had "brought new challenges" to the China-US relationship, "testing the two countries' ability to properly address an unexpected incident", Xu Xueyuan, charge d'affaires of the Chinese embassy in Washington, wrote in the article, published on Friday.

"We sincerely hope that the United States will work with China and not allow a wandering balloon to lead the bilateral relationship astray. We look forward to concrete steps to prevent the situation from going further down the wrong path, so that the China-US relationship can return to a track of sound and stable development."

The airship, "which was used for meteorological research, unintentionally entered US airspace because of the westerlies and its limited self-steering capability", Xu said.

China had made these details available to the US after "earnest verification" and in the shortest possible time, calling for the situation to be handled "in a calm, professional and quiet manner", she said. Yet the US had called the object a "spy balloon of the People's Liberation Army, and shot it down, though it posed no real security threat".

"The US also alleged that China has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program targeting the world, and illegally imposed sanctions on six Chinese companies and institutions. The overreaction by America — and its moves to heighten the issue — have exacerbated the situation. This isolated incident has caused new wounds in China-US relations.

"Many of the issues between the two countries originate from strategic misperception and misjudgment. The difficulty caused by the airship's accidental entrance in US airspace is just another example."