All blown up What was the Chinese 'spy balloon' actually for?

A Chinese balloon was brought down in a puff of smoke and debris by an air-launched missile, after perplexing Washington with its three-day odyssey over the continental US. The question is: what was it all for?

- By Julian Borger WASHINGTON

Once the balloon had been spotted, Beijing claimed it was a weather observation airship blown offcourse, drawing a snort of derision from the Pentagon, which said the balloon had made some deliberate turns, bringing it at one point over Montana, home of some of the US arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

If it was indeed a spy balloon, the whole episode raises a lot of questions about decision-making in Beijing. It was quite predictable that the balloon would be spotted, tracked and even shot down, and that all this would happen in the run-up to a visit by the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to Beijing.

That visit had been welcomed by Xi Jinping, who intended to meet Washington’s top diplomat, and the talks were meant to address a series of serious potential flashpoints between the two superpowers .

Either this was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, or it was possibly a deliberate attempt to sabotage any tension-soothing that Blinken’s trip might have achieved.