Business owner "Annie" holding up a copy of the Chinese Daily News newspaper showcasing pictures of a suspected Chinese spy balloon, in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles. - AP
BEIJING (Bloomberg): China boasted about its ability to shoot down spy balloons that strayed into its airspace back in 2019, more than three years before saying the US "overreacted” by destroying one of its vehicles.
A documentary shown on state television that is part of a series called National Defense Stories shows fighter pilots apparently practicing shooting down a balloon that could "endanger security of air defense.” In the video, a pilot presses a red button on his control stick, sending a missile into flight.
The documentary then cuts to the wreckage of a balloon in a forested area, with the narrator saying: "The white balloon detonates in the blink of an eye.” The documentary, which re-aired on state broadcaster China Central Television in 2020, didn’t actually show the balloon being destroyed in the exercise.
"It only took Wu Hui 30 seconds from locking onto the target to shooting it down,” the narrator adds, referring to the pilot, who is part of the southern military command that borders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.
China has accused the US of "hyping up” the threat posed by the balloon that the US took out with an F-22 firing a Sidewinder missile on Saturday. China has said the aircraft was collecting climate data when it was blown off course.
The US rejects that, saying the device was for surveillance purposes. US Navy divers are working to recover the wreckage in waters off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon, said to be the size of at least two school buses, and its sensors are lying in 50 feet (15 meters) of water and scattered over a 11km area.
The US sees last week’s incident as the latest in a global surveillance push by China, citing sightings of Chinese balloons in five countries across five continents, including in East Asia, South Asia and Europe in recent years.
The Pentagon said another Chinese balloon was recently spotted traveling over Latin America. China said that aircraft was also blown off course.
