In 1976, I spent the summer in Taiwan studying Chinese, living with the family of an officer in Taiwan’s defense forces. The colonel commanded a political warfare battalion on Quemoy, one of the Nationalist-held island redoubts just 10 kilometers from mainland China. His principal weapon: balloons. Their payload: anti-communist propaganda leaflets.
The colonel remained mum about the details, and politely rebuffed my requests to travel along with him to the island (known locally as Jinmen) for a visit. All this came back to me earlier this month, when a news photographer in Billings, Montana captured the image of a mysterious high-altitude object, which was soon tagged as a Chinese spy balloon. “Hysteria,” as Beijing called the furor (and not so wrongly) ensued.
And there was befuddlement. Why, people asked, did China float balloons over the U.S. when it (like other major powers) has hundreds of spy satellites in Near Earth Orbit? As it turned out, the answer was available in plenty of open source information by outlets ranging from the Union of Concerned Scientists to China itself.
How High?
First, the altitude of the “Chinese spy balloon” was estimated as 60,000 feet (18.3 kilometers). At such a height it was flying ten times closer than the lowest Earth-orbiting satellites. A surveillance platform on a balloon at 18 km can “see” more and intercept faint signals that would be reflected back to earth by the top layer of the atmosphere between it and the edge of space.
(The Satellite Database, Union of Concerned Scientists)
There was no small irony, meanwhile, in Beijing’s outrage that we shot down its balloon once it cleared the continental U.S. Back in the day China regularly shot down even manned U.S. and Taiwanese overflights (and probably tried without success many other times). But balloons were a constant annoyance.
In May, 1974, for example, an angry Premier Zhou Enlai ordered an alleged American spy balloon to be blasted out of the sky, according to an article by the retired U.S. diplomat David Cowhig, who referenced a report on the Chinese news site Baidu. According to these sources the balloon had drifted across China from Xinjiang in the west almost all the way across the mainland to its east coast before being downed by a J-6 fighter in Hebei province, not far from Beijing.
Zhou’s aggravation may have stemmed from previous American and Taiwan aerial incursions.
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