Abhijit Bhattacharyya | China’s mystery balloons: Why was West surprised?

The weeks-long recent drama over the mysterious Chinese balloons that were seen for several days floating over America, and were subsequently shot down by the US military, and other unidentified objects that were taken out with missiles over Alaska and Canada, have really raised more questions than provided answers. The details still remain opaque.

The United States, which was initially ecstatic, albeit temporarily, got a little edgy because for several days the Chinese military refused to take America’s attempted phone calls through so-called “hot line”, in a bid to express strong displeasure at the puncturing of its balloons.

China was angry and unimpressed as the United States also reiterated allegations of ceaseless theft, fraud, espionage and deceit committed by the Dragon deep inside Washington for years. Whether that’s true or untrue, the reality is that today’s “hi-tech” China is a creation of the US and the West in general since the 1970s.

The US saw China as a mega-market for its own manufacturing industry. This was also to keep in check its main Cold War rival -- stretching from the Volga to the Far East -- and rein in the “existential threat” it posed to the European heartland. The reach and expanse of the then Soviet Union, from Vladivostok to Vilnius, from the Bering to the Baltic Sea, created fear across the West, and the US wanted to wean China away from the clutches of the Soviets.

The exponential growth in Sino-US trade gave the Dragon a spectacular opportunity to test the West and use its wealth to its own advantage. In almost four decades, cheap Chinese goods had flooded the West (and India as well) and the US had dug its own graveyard. While US firms invested heavily in China, setting up factories to produce goods at a cheaper price to maximise profits, the Chinese too invested heavily in America, buying up companies and dominating the financial markets.

Let’s now focus on the aviation sector in particular. US and Western companies had paved the way for their own decline by willingly offering the Chinese a portion of the aerial pie. A few examples reveal the myopia of the US and Western governments. In 2011, a “company” run by the Communist Party of China’s People’s Liberation Army bought up US piston-engine maker Teledyne Continental, and in 2013 it did the same with German diesel aero-engine maker Thielert.

Beijing steadily lured the West’s aero-engine makers to co-produce in China. Overnight, Soviet engines had Western rivals as the Chinese signed an MoU in 2009 with CFM International for a joint venture to do “research and development; manufacture; final assembly; testing; sales; maintenance; repair and overhaul; service; technological development; and consultation”. In 2011 followed a Sino-German agreement with Berlin’s MTU to develop a commercial aero-engine industry in Beijing and to collaborate on civil aircraft CJ-1000. The Americans and the Europeans, greedy for fresh markets, had no idea of what Beijing’s real game was.

Both the West and India were hopelessly off the mark for at least six decades to read the CPC-PLA’s intentions correctly. But everything was on record. China’s post-Mao overlord Deng Xiaoping had openly spelt out the PLA’s aim just before leaving for Paris: “To learn knowledge (read ‘technology’) from the West to save China”.

From today, look back 51 years. In 1972, China requested the British government to “licence the manufacture of Rolls-Royce Spey aircraft engine”, which was signed on December 13, 1975, during the last days of dictator Mao Zedong.

According to Jane’s, China’s Xian Aero-Engine Corporation has been “producing large numbers of engine parts for General Electric, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce and Snecma (Safran Aircraft Engines)”. Thus, from the beginning, China has targeted the best of both Cold War camps with a single-minded target to produce indigenous engines for indigenous airframes through every and any means, fair or foul. Aviation includes anything and everything which is in the air -- whether it’s Boeing or balloon, Lockheed or weather exploring apparatus.

The Chinese aviation saga mentioned here reminds the West in general, and the United States in particular, that the latter needs to remember a few fundamentals relating to its own past acts, both memorable and messy. The American mainland is virtually an impregnable fortress, that is impossible to be attacked or conquered by any army, unlike Russia, India and the European nations, which are known for their numerous historical land battles and invasions against each other for centuries. In contrast, the vastness and indisputable greatness of the US so far could only be threatened through three aerial incidents.

The first foreign attack was made 4,050 miles off the US mainland, at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii by the imperial Japanese navy and air force was over 81 years ago, in December 1941. The second airborne attack targeted the US east coast commercial, financial and political hubs on September 11, 2001. This time though the attackers weren’t military men but terrorists in hijacked aircraft who inflicted colossal human and economic loss. And now, the third and latest foreign assault by Chinese balloons which made a whale of a high-profile flying display of US “sovereignty infringement”.

Flying for over a week at 60,000 feet nonchalantly through the entire  continental US in northwest-southeast axis uninterrupted, unimpeded and unchallenged, it created furore owing to an “uncontrolled and uncontrollable” flight path, busy picking up “weather info”, though beneath which (accidentally or otherwise) lay nuclear silos to soldiers’ barracks, commercial hubs to combat machine manufacturing centres.

The pertinent point, therefore, is the grim reminder to the US-led West. Gone are the days of the US fighting for itself and its allies or along with the armed forces of other countries -- in Normandy (France), Nangarhar (Afghanistan), Nagasaki (Japan) or Vietnam – all of which are thousands of miles off the American mainland’s coast.

The world today is in the grip of severe turbulence which doesn’t seem to be taking the US-led West kindly. In the Beijing balloon context, the key role played by Washington in the rise of the CPC-PLA is there for all to see. Successive American establishments made a hash of things, with monumental error of judgment, and got entangled with “globalisation” and “liberalisation” and the concept of the world as a global village, along with the “unrestricted movement of goods, capital and labour”. All this (to put it mildly) challenged the 1648 Westphalia “nation state” concept. The lesson to learn is this: excessive prising open of a nation’s economy can be injurious to its economic and security health.