The Washington Post’s long-time columnist David Ignatius, who has often been a favored conduit into the media for U.S. intelligence services, wrote a very frank Feb. 10 column identifying Earth surveillance “from the stratosphere,” or “near space” as an area of open competition between America and China for more than a decade. Suddenly a combination of the Biden Administration and wild anti-China hawks in Congress has changed that “in an especially frantic and destabilizing way, into a new front in a U.S.-Chinese confrontation that is nearing Cold War dimensions.”
Since at least 2010, Ignatius wrote, China has been openly describing its plans and practices for “utilization of near space,” referring to the stratosphere above 59,000 feet; and furthermore, it is responding to the United States in this. A 2019 article by two Chinese law professors is an example: In the not-so-secret University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, they described China’s program at length. One Shenzhen company, “Kuang-Chi is developing helium-filled balloons and other kinds of lighter-than-air-vehicles to furnish aerial surveillance, communication, near-space tourism, and wireless WiFi transmission to remote areas,” their article stated. “These represent the future of activities in the airspace.”
