By Humeyra Pamuk and Ryan Woo
MUNICH/BEIJING (Reuters) -China's top diplomat Wang Yi on Saturday accused the United States of violating international norms with "hysterical" behavior, as a running dispute over a suspected Chinese spy balloon moved to the forefront of a global security conference in Munich.
Hours after the comments, which further weighed on the already strained U.S.-China relationship, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken left his hotel in Munich for an undisclosed location amid expectations of a meeting with his Chinese counterpart.
As Blinken entered his vehicle in his hotel's garage, he did not answer a shouted question from a reporter on whether he was going to meet with Wang, pool footage from CNN showed.
The U.S. State Department declined to say whether the top American diplomat was holding talks with Wang. Asked earlier by a Reuters reporter on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference about the possibility of a meeting with Blinken, Wang smiled and declined to comment.
The dispute over the balloon - which flew over the United States and Canada before being shot down on President Joe Biden's orders, hurt bilateral relations and came at a time when the West is closely watching Beijing's response to the Ukraine war.
"To have dispatched an advanced fighter jet to shoot down a balloon with a missile, such behavior is unbelievable, almost hysterical," Wang said on Saturday.
"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?" he said.
"We ask the U.S. to show its sincerity and correct its mistakes, face up and resolve this incident, which has damaged Sino-U.S. relations."
The balloon's flight this month over the U.S. mainland triggered an uproar in Washington and prompted Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing. That Feb. 5-6 trip would have been the first by a U.S. secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilize 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-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
China reacted angrily when the U.S. military shot down the 200-foot (60-meter) balloon on Feb. 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. He said he expected 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 U.S. fighters, Biden did not say when he would speak with Xi, but said the United States was continuing to engage diplomatically with China on the issue.
"We are not looking for a new Cold War," he said.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Ryan Woo, Trevor Hunnicutt, Sabine Siebold, Andrew Gray, Alexander Ratz, John Irish, Andreas Rinke, Jonathan Landay; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Alex Richardson, Diane Craft and Jonathan Oatis)
Related Post