Biden admin may be overlooking how deep the China security breach went, expert warns
Biden claims spy flight was 'not a major breach' of US national security
Mercatus Center Senior Fellow Weifeng Zhong discusses the Biden administration's handling of China's spy flight over the U.S.
Biden administration officials may be overlooking important details about the Chinese spy flight, as one expert raises concerns around how deep the security breach really went.
"I think U.S. government officials are overlooking that when they state we have not had any major breach because of the balloons, because the information they were able to take might be actually invaluable to the Chinese military," Weifeng Zhong, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said on "Mornings with Maria" Friday.
Zhong’s comments come just one day after President Joe Biden claimed the spy balloon was "not a major breach" of U.S. national security. The Mercatus Center senior fellow refuted the president’s claims.
The downing of the suspected Chinese spy balloon by a missile from an F-22 fighter jet. (Chad Fish via AP / AP Newsroom)
"If we think about the Chinese balloon up there, they might be collecting, for example, wind speed up there, something that might look innocent. But if we are talking about Chinese development of missiles, for example, that would become very useful information," Zhong explained.
On Saturday afternoon off the South Carolina coast, a fighter jet shot down a 200-foot balloon, which weighed about 2,000 pounds and had a payload roughly the size of a jet airliner. It was believed to have originated from China and first entered U.S. airspace over Alaska's Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28, Fox News reported.
Chinese and U.S. economies share a "puzzling phenomenon" where they're "so intertwined," senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center Weifeng Zhong said on "Mornings with Maria" Friday, February 10, 2023. (AP Newsroom)
Sources familiar with yesterday’s classified Senate briefing also told Fox News that Biden officials admitted to lawmakers that the spy balloon was partly comprised of Western components with English writing.
"That's actually a very puzzling phenomenon, because if you think about any random goods you pick up in China, it's very hard to find something that really doesn't have any Western part. The same is true for any goods you can pick up in America – it's very hard to find anything that really doesn't have any parts made with China," Zhong explained.
The expert continued to argue that this reveals "a lot" about the nature of our global economy, "which is that the two economies, U.S. and China, are so intertwined."
Fox News' Bryan Llenas reports on the U.S. military recovery and salvage operation of the spy balloon used in Chinese surveillance mission.
"It's very hard to implement something that's entirely made from home, which means that we need to make a trade-off," Zhong said. "We need to identify what sectors or what companies overseas, in China, we need to censor and what really critical technologies we may want to bring home, because we can't really just do anything because it's just so costly."
While there used to be an "upside" to entering the Chinese market in the early 2000s, now there’s too great of a "security risk," the senior research fellow noted.
"We were even saying that China would become a democracy, but that was just wishful thinking at the time. And so all of this actually led to where we are today, meaning it's very hard now to eliminate any trace of Chinese product in the U.S. market," Zhong said. "And we are going to have to accept that some degree of integration with the Chinese economy is inevitable."
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The Wall Street Journal Asia technology news reporter Liza Lin says the reason behind the Chinese spy flight will become clearer in the coming weeks.
FBI specialists have already started analyzing the debris in Quantico, Virginia, with a primary focus on recovered electronics.
Republicans have harshly criticized Biden for not taking immediate action to shoot down the balloon. Some Democrats have also questioned why there was a delay in bringing it down.
Fox News’ Paul Best contributed to this report.