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Opinion | Like a giant balloon, US-China relations have strayed far off course
- The wandering balloon and Washington’s decision to shoot it down have become yet another bone of contention between the US and China
- The deterioration of Sino-US relations is no doubt accelerating, and hopes to stabilise ties are fading fast
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The start of the Year of the Rabbit will be remembered for a number of things, not least of which are two “wandering” entities.
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The first is the popular Chinese science fiction movie The Wandering Earth II, released on January 22. Adapted from a novella by Liu Cixin, who is best known for his bestselling novel The Three Body Problem, the film sees China unite with the rest of the world in a race against time to save the Earth. Together, nations build huge engines to propel the planet out of our solar system, away from the dying sun, and begin a journey across the universe to find a new home.
The film received a rather poor review from The New York Times, but it performed well in China and now ranks among the top 10 highest-grossing Chinese films of all time, joining its predecessor The Wandering Earth.
The second is the huge Chinese balloon first spotted flying over North America on January 28 and shot down by the military on February 4 just as it was about to leave US airspace, in a burst of American nationalism. After the balloon was downed, the House of Representatives and Senate, on February 9 and 15 respectively, voted unanimously to adopt separate resolutions accusing China of violating US sovereignty.
China told Canadian and US authorities that the balloon was a meteorological airship that entered their skies by force majeure. However, the US insists it was a spy balloon and refuses to return the fragments of the downed balloon to China.
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The incident became not only an easy excuse for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a scheduled visit to China, but also one of the major issues that he confronted top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi about on February 18 during their one-hour unofficial meeting at the 56th Munich Security Conference. Both sides simply reiterated their diametrically opposed positions.
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