administration acted indecisively and waited too long, letting the balloon float across the continental u.s. for days. president biden says the military advised him there would be less danger to the public in shooting down the balloon once it got over the ocean. lawmakers are reacting sharply and along party lines. i want to start by doing something that i don t do very often, which is commending joe biden for actually having the guts to shoot this down. that was the right thing to do. that is absolutely what the president should have done. unfortunately he didn t do that until a week after it entered u.s. airspace. they re saying we should have shot down the balloon the minute we saw it. i would use two words in answering these gop criticisms. they are premature, and they are political. presidents have the ability to go before a camera, go before the nation and basically explain these things early on, and his failure to do so, i don t understand that. i don t understan
weather balloon that drifted off course. beijing is condemning the u.s. decision to shoot it down. cnn s selina wang joins us from beijing. what s the latest from your end? reporter: well, jim, beijing has been saying the u.s. is overreacting by shooting down its balloon, and china s defense ministry gave this vague warning that it reserves, quote, the right to use necessary means to deal with similar situations. but it s clear that china doesn t want to escalate things further. beijing has been trying to repair the relationship with the u.s., and secretary of state antony blinken s now postponed trip to china was supposed to be a big political win. both the u.s. and china use surveillance satellites to spy on each other from the air. so if china already has these more sophisticated satellites, we re still left with this question of why it would use a balloon for spying and why at such a critical moment right before blinken s trip. we still don t know if it was an accident, if it was
you ve been in this position of having to deal with the chinese on a diplomatic level. they can be hard-nosed adversaries. does the biden administration need to get tough and sort of give a very upfront warning to the chinese that this cannot ever happen again? well, the trip had to be canceled, and it was a message to beijing that if you re going to spy, use your high-altitude satellites the way that we re spying on them. don t send balloons that are visible to the american people over our territory and that we will respond with force. we had to shoot it down, and we had to tell the american public. now we re going to be able to collect some of the evidence and some of the actual surveillance equipment, and we ll be able to present to the world that, hey, this is not just a weather balloon. are you worried about the state of u.s./china relations right now? have you seen them as bad as
jinping was looped in because it certainly is an embarrassment and a setback. china has been sticking to this line that it s just a civilian research balloon, a weather balloon that went off course. state media even announced that the head of china s weather service has been dismissed, which some analysts say is an attempt to support beijing s claim that this was indeed a weather balloon that went astray. now, the u.s. says they are confident this was a surveillance balloon trying to monitor sensitive military sites. the u.s. said this balloon and the other one that was spotted over latin america have surveillance equipment not usually used for standard civilian research and say both are part of a fleet of chinese spy balloons that have been spotted across five continents over the last several years. and how is the incident being covered by chinese state media, for example? what are they saying? reporter: well, chinese state media is mostly parroting the official line and also accu