US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has slipped away from a Munich security conference to confer with China’s most senior diplomat, who only hours earlier ridiculed the Biden administration for shooting down its balloon.
“To have dispatched an advanced fighter jet to shoot down a balloon with a missile, such behaviour is unbelievable, almost hysterical,” said envoy Wang Yi.
“There are so many balloons all over the world and various countries have them, so is the United States going to shoot all of them down?
“We ask the US to show its sincerity and correct its mistakes, face up and resolve this incident, which has damaged Sino-US relations.”
Within two hours of those remarks, Blinken’s motorcade was spotted leaving the conference for an undisclosed location.
Relations in disarray
“We can confirm that Secretary Blinken concluded a meeting with … Wang Yi on the margins of the Munich Security Conference,” a senior State Department official said by email, on condition of anonymity.
The dispute over the balloon, which flew over the US and Canada before being shot down on President Joe Biden’s orders, has hurt bilateral relations and comes at a time when the West is closely watching Beijing’s response to the Ukraine war.
The balloon’s flight this month over the US mainland triggered an uproar in Washington and prompted Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing.
What was left of the balloon and its payload after being hit with a Sidewinder missile has been recovered from the sea off South Carolina and is now being examined at an FBI laboratory in Virginia.
Blinken’s trip to Beijing would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilise increasingly fraught ties.
Washington had been hoping to put a “floor” under relations that hit a dangerous low in August with China’s reaction to a visit to Taiwan by then-US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
China’s dubious ‘explanation’
China reacted angrily when the US military shot down the 60-metre balloon on February 4, saying it was for monitoring weather conditions and had blown off course.
But Washington said it clearly was a surveillance balloon with a massive undercarriage holding electronics.
On Thursday, Biden gave a speech focusing on the balloon incident, saying he expects to speak with China’s President Xi Jinping about it and hoped to get to the bottom of the affair.
In his most extensive remarks to date about the Chinese balloon and three unidentified objects downed by US fighters, Biden did not say when he would speak with Xi, but said the US was continuing to engage diplomatically with China on the issue.
“We are not looking for a new Cold War,” he said.
-AAP
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