The Chinese press this Monday accused Washington of “lack of sincerity” in initiatives to improve bilateral relations, in response to the cancellation of the US Secretary of State’s trip to Beijing over the Chinese balloon flying over the United States.
“The US government’s response to the incident, which is to use it as an excuse to postpone the trip, shows its lack of sincerity,” the Global Times, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said in a statement. editorial published on the weekend.
According to the newspaper, the balloon, which was shot down on Saturday, “posed no significant risk to information gathering, yet politicians and the North American press came back to exaggerate the situation by launching yet another smear campaign against China.” “.
As a result of that case, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his trip to China. It would be the first visit to China by a cabinet secretary to US President Joe Biden. According to the British newspaper Financial Times, the agenda included a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“Usually in such incidents caused by force majeure, the two sides go ahead with their agenda after expressing their regret. Blinken’s decision was disproportionate,” said researcher Lu Xiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Social, quoted by the newspaper.
According to the academic, “anti-Chinese forces roam freely in the United States and use incidents like this to stir up anti-Chinese sentiment and distort China’s global image,” he said. “They want to contain and isolate China from the international scene,” added Lu.
The researcher believed that in an atmosphere of polarization, any incident “becomes an excuse to escalate the confrontation.”
“Internally, we’ve seen how the Republican Party has used this issue to attack President Joe Biden’s administration, which in turn has taken an aggressive stance,” he described. “China had not yet confirmed Blinken’s visit. We cannot rule out that Washington used this to exert pressure,” he noted.
China admitted on Friday that the balloon was part of it, though it said “it is a civilian airship used for research purposes, mainly in the field of meteorology”.
The discovery of the balloon in US airspace sparked a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing and led to the suspension of Blinken’s planned trip to the Asian country between Sunday and today.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said today that the United States “used indiscriminate force” in shooting down the balloon, according to a statement from China’s foreign ministry.
The official described Washington’s response as overblown and accused the United States of “serious violation of the spirit of international law.”
Source: DN
