>


we are using a balloon as a way to cancel our meeting

Fuck I wish I could do that at work.
And so the Balloon Wars have begun >

WWIII starts with a couple balloons >

99* >

The Goldfinger version is THE best. >

Maybe not the best, but it's definitely a bangin cover. >

They are pouting >

If you read the article, you’d see we requested a call immediately after shooting down the spy balloon.
If that’s the case, I can speculate on why they declined the call at that time:

They are sticking with the story that this was a civilian balloon, thus no need for defense ministry to get involved.
They didn’t know what their official position would be yet. A lot of analysts are bewildered by this whole incident, which led to Blinken postponing a trip to Beijing that the Chinese themselves very much wanted. It’s like they intentionally sabotaged themselves right before a meeting they wanted. There are speculations that not everyone in the Chinese government was rowing for the same direction, or it could just be a case where the left hand wasn’t talking to the right hand. If that’s the case they were most likely too busy panicking internally to talk to us.

A lot of people say this whole incident was some kind of mastermind move by the Chinese to provoke the US or test our defense or what not, but many analysts think it really looks like a case of serious internal fuck up/incompetence. 
They wanted to meet Blinken enough that Xi was scheduled to talk to him personally. The timing just doesn’t make sense.
I speculate the Chinese is gonna say some semi-harsh stuff for their domestic audience to consume and then quickly quiet down and pretend this never happened. I think they fucked up and they know it.
Edit: the Chinese blew it so badly that Biden had to address it in his State of the Union address. In fact the rest of the stuff he said about China was pretty much reconciliatory (“We welcome competition and we commit to work with China when it benefits us, blah blah blah”), but now he had to throw in a line to address the balloon in the room lol. >

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” >

meh if this is deliberate then my guess it's their way of telling Blinken NOT to come >

It doesn't say good things about them if they swing wildly from "we're so excited to meet with you that you will meet specifically with our head of state" to "we are using a balloon as a way to cancel our meeting". That still suggests a fuck up, just a different kind.