This week, we've got a short show focused on the Chinese balloon that became the obsessive focus of American attention from Thursday through Sunday, February 5, when an F-22 shot it out of the sky off of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow with the Economics Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, joins to discuss the incident and its potential fallout.

We'll have the transcript for you on the website in a day or so.

2:27 –Establishing the facts about the Balloon

4:32 – Precedents for U.S. reactions to aerial surveillance

7:36 – Was the balloon’s flight path intentional?

9:34 – Why did the Pentagon go public?

13:26 – The thinking behind Blinken’s postponement

15:47 – Reactions in U.S. media

17:19 – Beijing’s perspective on the U.S. reaction

20:23 – How Gerard Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balloon

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Gerard: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, by John Pomfret

Kaiser: Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations by Pete Millwood

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