Republican lawmakers are expressing alarm over Beijing’s persistent efforts to use Western outlets to spread its narratives, including claims that Washington had overreacted to a “wandering balloon” and damaged the bilateral relationship.
In an op-ed recently published in the Washington Post, Xu Xueyuan, the chargé d’affaires at the Chinese regime’s embassy in Washington, repeated Beijing’s narrative that the balloon was for “meteorological research” and “posed no real security threat.”
She accused the United States of “overreaction,” adding that “China-U.S. relations should not be led astray by a wandering balloon.”
The article has been shared by prominent CCP diplomats and Chinese state-run media, including Huang Ping, Beijing’s consul general in New York, and Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington….