WASHINGTON – China on Sunday protested against Washington’s decision to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over North America, accusing the United States of overreacting and warning that it reserves the right to take retaliatory measures.

But with bipartisan consensus in the US foreign and national security establishments regarding China as an existential threat, it was long clear that President Joe Biden did not have any choice but to shoot the balloon down.

Shooting it down safely gave Mr Biden a chance to look confident and in charge, in the face of a chorus from China hawks in Congress.

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, who is the highest ranking Democrat on a new House China committee, told CNN that the balloon was a reminder that the Communist Party of China was “committing surveillance and violations of our own national sovereignty”.

He added: “Probably there were actors within the Chinese Communist Party who continued with their aggressive surveillance, and it’s not even clear whether the left and the right hands knew what the other was doing.”

Questions have arisen over the timing of the balloon’s flight, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken was about to travel to Beijing, a trip meant to restore diplomatic momentum following the meeting of Mr Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali in November.

Both leaders had agreed to resume normal diplomacy suspended by China in the wake of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August.

The incident scuppered Mr Blinken’s trip, with Washington saying it would not be appropriate for him to travel to Beijing for meetings at this time.

Experts had hoped that the visit by Mr Blinken – who would have been the most senior US diplomat to travel to Beijing since 2018 – would put a floor under the bilateral relationship and prevent ties from deteriorating further.

Responding to the shoot-down, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Sunday expressed its “dissatisfaction and protest against the US’ use of force to attack the unmanned civilian airship”.

Washington’s actions showed that it was “obviously overreacting and seriously violating international practice”, the ministry added.

Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Tan Kefei said in a separate statement that Beijing reserves the right to use the necessary means to deal with similar situations, without elaborating.

The shooting down of the suspected spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday has highlighted how relations between the two superpowers can be held hostage to domestic politics in the US, said Chinese analysts.

Professor Zhu Feng, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Nanjing University, said that what should have been a technical issue had become a high-level issue of security confrontation between China and the US.

“This should serve as a reminder to Chinese and American leaders that in order to have a stable and manageable Sino-US relationship, emotional domestic politics must be kept at a distance, otherwise the bilateral relationship will only get worse,” he added.

Mr Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times and a commentator known for his nationalistic views, said the manner in which politicians in the US had stirred up American public opinion with the incident meant that shooting down the balloon was the only way that it could have been brought to a conclusion.

The balloon, first spotted earlier last week loitering over Montana, was shot down on Saturday by an F-22 fighter jet using an air-to-air missile, according to US military officials.

Beijing has rejected allegations that the balloon was meant for espionage, saying instead that it was an unmanned civilian airship intended to monitor the weather.

Chinese analysts said the US response was an escalation, pointing out that it showed how anti-China sentiments in the US political establishment were proving to be the biggest impediment to the improvement of ties.

The incident, which was closely watched on social media by netizens in both countries, also showed that “public opinion in both countries was becoming more inflammable, making the future more bleak”, said Professor Shi Yinhong, director of the Centre on American Studies at the Renmin University of China.

Writing on Weibo, Mr Hu said the shoot-down showed that the US was “incapable of dealing with the incident in a practical manner, and must politicise it”.

“China is dealing with a US that does not need to drink to get drunk, its internal (political) strife is constantly generating hostilities that spill over to the international stage,” he said.

In a commentary for the journal The Hill, Dr Bradley Thayer, director of China policy at the Centre for Security Policy, said the balloon may have been an attempt at political warfare.

He wrote: “First and foremost, it reminds Americans that their homeland is vulnerable to attack.”