The United States has postponed a visit to China by its chief of diplomacy, Antony Blinken, over the detection of a Chinese balloon flying over sensitive areas in the country, the Associated Press (AP) reported Friday.
Blinken would visit Beijing on Sunday and Monday and had a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the agenda.
China said it was a meteorological research balloon that had gone off course, but the United States had considered it a spy balloon flying over an area where military installations are located..
The AP quoted a US official as saying the postponement of Blinken’s trip was to give President Joe Biden’s administration time to assess how to respond to Beijing.
A US government source told the French agency AFP that Blinken’s trip will be rescheduled once “the conditions are right”.
The same source, who asked the AFP not to be named, said the United States is confident it can maintain “open channels of dialogue” with Beijing despite the incident.
The decision to postpone the visit was taken just hours before Blinken left for Beijing.
The AP source, also unnamed, said Biden and Blinken had decided it was best not to proceed with the trip at this time.
The discovery of the balloon was announced Thursday by Pentagon officials.
One of the places where it was sighted was over the state of Montana, where one of the three fields of nuclear missile silos is located, at the Malmstrom Air Force base.
A senior Defense official told the AP that fighter jets were even prepared to shoot down the large balloon.
The Pentagon chose not to do this for fear that the debris could endanger people despite flying over a sparsely populated area.
The same source said the balloon had limited value in terms of providing information that could only be obtained through other technologies, such as spy satellites.
Responding to Washington’s allegations, China today admitted the balloon was part of it, but said it was a civilian airship used primarily for meteorological research and had deviated “much from its planned course” due to the wind.
“The Chinese side regrets the involuntary entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,” the ministry said in a statement, citing a legal term used to refer to events beyond its control.
Blinken’s visit to Beijing was eagerly awaited given the disagreements between the two countries on issues such as Taiwan, human rights, China’s claims in Asia, North Korea, Russia’s war against Ukraine, trade policy and climate change.
Blinken would be the highest-ranking member of US President Joe Biden’s administration to visit China on a mission to reverse a sharp deterioration in relations between the two countries over trade disputes and concerns over increasingly aggressive attitudes. soften. and the South China Sea.
The Blinken rallies were seen in both countries as a way to find common ground amid the issues that divide them, the AP said.
The trip was organized by Biden and Xi last November, when they met on the sidelines of a summit in Indonesia.
Blinken’s visit has not been formally announced, but government officials in Beijing and Washington have been discussing the trip in recent days.
At a press conference on January 17, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin welcomed Blinken’s trip, saying the two governments were “discussing the details of the visit”.
“China is pursuing US-China relations based on the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation,” the spokesman said.
Wang added at the time that China hoped the two countries would return to a “healthy and stable relationship”.
Source: DN
