Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat down with China’s top diplomat Saturday for the first high-level meeting since this month’s spy balloon incident.
Blinken and Wang Yi, the Chinese Communist Party’s senior foreign policy official, spoke for an hour in Germany during the annual Munich Security Conference.
“I condemned the incursion of the [People’s Republic of China’s] surveillance balloon and stressed it must never happen again,” Blinken tweeted after their meeting.
The meeting came hours after Beijing’s emissary publicly bashed the US shoot-down of China’s balloon off the coast of South Carolina as “hysterical” and “unimaginable” – and complained that the American response violated international customs.
“There are so many balloons all over the world, so is the United States going to shoot all of them down?” Wang, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, asked.
An object thought to be a Chinese surveillance balloon spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before President Joe Biden ordered it shot down Feb. 4. China denied any espionage.
Wang made the remarks in response to a question at the Munich conference. He was also asked if he would try to work with US delegates to get US-Sino relations on a better track.
“We ask the US to show its sincerity and correct its mistakes, face up and resolve this incident, which has damaged Sino-US relations,” he said.
“We hope the US could pursue a pragmatic and positive policy towards China, and work with China to push Sino-US relations back to the track of healthy development.”
