(Update with details, citations; add authors)
By Humeyra Pamuk and Ryan Woo
MUNICH/BEIJING, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday that the US handling of the balloon incident had been “unimaginable” and “hysterical”, an “absurd” act that violated international standards.
Hours after the comments, which further aggravated already strained US-China relations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken left his hotel in Munich for an undisclosed location pending a meeting with its Chinese counterpart. .
Upon entering his hotel garage, Blinken did not respond to a reporter’s shouted question about whether he was going to meet Wang, CNN footage showed.
Asked by a Reuters reporter on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference about the possibility of a meeting with Blinken, Wang smiled and declined to comment.
“There are a lot of balloons all over the world, will the United States shoot them all down?” Wang, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said at the meeting. of the Security Conference. .from Munich.
A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy craft, spent a week flying over the US and Canada before being shot down off the Atlantic coast earlier this month on the orders of the US president Joe Biden.
The incident, which led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing earlier this month, has further aggravated already strained relations between the two powers.
Wang took questions from the Munich conference moderator about the incident, and was asked if he would engage with the U.S. delegates present to restore more normal dialogue between the countries.
“We call on the United States to show sincerity and correct its mistakes, to come forward and resolve this incident, which has damaged China-US relations,” the official said.
“We hope the United States can pursue a pragmatic and positive policy toward China, and work with China to put China-US relations back on the path of healthy development.”
Blinken’s visit to Beijing would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilize bilateral relations. (Reporting by Ryan Woo in Beijing; Editing by Jason Neely and Clelia Oziel)