China accuses U.S. of flying surveillance balloons over their airspace

China has accused the United States of flying more than 10 high-altitude balloons into its airspace over the last year. A claim the Biden administration refutes. For more on this, let's welcome in Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman. Rick, it has been a wild couple of days in this whole balloon saga going back to Friday when something was shot down. I'm not sure we know what. What are we learning, my man? Right. So China is obviously embarrassed by this.

And what's been happening since the first one got shot down, the big one we all watched go, drift across the United States and then get shot down in the Atlantic Ocean off South Carolina. So now we've got three other objects. Some sounds like a couple of those are balloons. The White House has said at least one of them is not a balloon. It's something else. And if these really are coming from China, what is happening in China? Are these already up in the air and they just can't be retrieved? How many more are coming our way? And what is China planning to do about it? So China now is playing this tit for tat game where they said recently, oh, the United States does this too. And we've seen the U.

S. balloons coming over Chinese airspace. But there's a problem here. Number one, the White House categorically says that this is not something the United States does. And number two, where's the evidence? In the U.S., here in the U.

S., we've shot down four of these things. We've got wreckage and debris. Everybody saw the footage. Without a doubt, the Pentagon has collected all kinds of intelligence on these, these objects while they were still in the air. They were flying U-2 spy aircraft up to measure what these objects were doing, what kind of intelligence they might have been gathered, and what kind of equipment they might have had on them. And we've got nothing like that from China.

So this matters, Gabe, because President Biden is in the process. He has been for several months now of trying to convince allies that we should all get tough on China. That China is newly militant, that it's going to be a problem in terms of territorial ambitions and other things. And this really just adds evidence. It's helping make Biden's case. And the Chinese need to do something about it, which they will. But right now, they're just backpedaling and they look kind of silly.

Yeah, Rick, I guess, why does this leave the relationship between the U.S. and China? Obviously, tensions rising very quickly. And then when it comes to Biden's policy towards China, clearly there's pressure there for him to take a tougher stance against China. Do you think it's not now the time that we are finally going to see that? No, we've already seen it. And we've talked about this a little bit. This has gotten a little bit under the radar.

But these export controls that Biden announced last, I think it was last October with regard to selling advanced semiconductors and other types of advanced technology to China, basically a ban on that level of U.S. technology or technology expertise going to China. That includes Americans working in China on that kind of technology. That's one of the toughest, maybe the toughest kind of sanction we've ever put on China. That's way more serious than what Trump did with just with tariffs on imports, which wasn't really addressed at national security. And in addition to what Biden did with these export controls, he has been trying to convince allies with some success to do the same thing so that we end up with what you might call kind of a coalition of nations that are refusing new technology to China.

And Biden has explicitly said it's technology that could be used in missiles and weapons and other types of things like that. So this helps Biden's case because Biden has been trying to say that President Xi Jinping in China is not just focused on peaceful economic growth so much anymore. He's been menacing toward Taiwan. He clearly is sort of starting this superpower competition with the United States. So it's ramping up. This balloon spat is going to settle down once the balloons are no longer flying around and there will be some kind of detente here. We were able to do that with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But clearly, relations with China are just getting more tense, not less.

Yahoo Finance, Personal Finance, Money, Investing, Business, Savings, Investment, Stocks, Bonds, FX, Currencies, NYSE, Equities, News, Politics, Market, Markets, Yahoo FInance Premium, Stock market