China  Test Run Spy Balloons For Maritime Surveillance

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quick to claim that a spy balloon breaching US territorial airspace and flying close enough to military sites to monitor them was ‘a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes’ that had accidentally wandered off course.

Pentagon officials and the US intelligence community dismissed that claim and linked the balloon to a ‘vast surveillance program’ run by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, partly operating out of Hainan province on China’s south coast.

Beijing’s spy balloon is a clear example of an emerging technology developed for military and intelligence operations but that crucially evolved out of civilian and scientific programs.

One company that is a strong candidate for contributing to the development of the balloon—and certainly works on similar technology that it supplies to the PLA—is a Shenzhen-based metamaterials company, Kuang-Chi, which has also been sanctioned by the US government for human rights abuses in China.

Open-source documents and media reports about China’s balloon-technology programs contain sober lessons about Beijing’s incremental acquisition of foreign intellectual property and its technology partnerships with Western research institutions.

This in turn highlights the difficulty in assessing dual-use technologies and serves as a reminder that Western countries need to review their scientific and commercial collaborations to ensure that those arrangements don’t allow an adversary to deploy those capabilities against their interests.

To analyse the value that China’s military leadership attaches to balloons and the near-space region (between 20 and 100 kilometres above the earth’s surface), it’s important to understand Beijing’s strategic intent and the resources it has allocated to such capabilities. Various Chinese government documents indicate that meteorological balloons, and other stratospheric airships, are important to the PLA’s aerospace strategy.

Only three major organizations in China have the capabilities to operate a balloon of the type and size spotted over North America.

According to a US State Department official, one of those organizations, the PLA, likely uses balloons for military intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Financial Times has suggested, based on footage of the craft, that they could potentially carry warheads.

The other two organizations are the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which had an overall annual budget of US$24 billion in 2022—though only a few institutes within the organization work directly on balloon research programs—and the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), which had an annual budget of $5.8 billion in 2022. Both of these civilian government departments are involved in ‘military-civil fusion’ projects and collaborate with the PLA.

In October 2017, the CAS began a military–civilian project to build China’s first scientific experiment system to conduct astrobiological experiments, monitor the weather and measure electromagnetic radiation in the near-space region. According to the Project 2049 Institute, the CMA also has potential capabilities for military intelligence collection and surveillance. In 2019, the CMA implemented a 15-year plan for the development of meteorological observation technology, which states that the CMA will increase its military–civil fusion capabilities and develop systems such as a space-based global navigation satellite system reflected signal observer on long-distance, super-pressure balloons, low-orbit satellites and other airships.

The PLA, CAS and CMA have reportedly launched high-altitude balloons from at least four locations: the Da Qaidam region in Qinghai province; Urad Zhongqi Airport; a near-space aerostat experiment base in Inner Mongolia; and a base identified by The War Zone near Bosten Lake, the largest lake in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which lies next to the Malan atomic test base.

 

High-resolution images of the Chinese balloon crossing over the US suggest that it’s similar to balloons built by Kuang-Chi. Kuang-Chi was one of the first companies visited by Xi Jinping after he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. In 2020, the company was sanctioned by the US Commerce Department for enabling ‘wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance, and/or facilitat[ing] the export of items by China that aid repressive regimes around the world’.

 

If and when the US publicly reveals more details about the downed balloon, one question we can hope to see answered is whether Kuang-Chi has been using new metamaterials to develop military-use balloons for the PLA. Most scientific balloons, including the type used by CAS for research, remain afloat for between a couple of hours and a few days. The flight time for a journey from China to halfway around the globe and back suggests that the balloon over the US was a ‘super-pressure balloon’ made from new metamaterials that can withstand cosmic radiation and extreme conditions while being light enough to carry a heavy payload.

 

Only a few civilian and military research teams have access to this technology in China. A search of patents shows that Harbin Institute of Technology, one of China’s top defence universities, has researched high-altitude balloons using new ‘aircraft skin materials’ to carry more weight and be more durable. Kuang-Chi also claims it was the first company in China to incorporate aircraft skin metamaterial (?????) as part of its balloon ‘Traveller‘ (???) program. Traveller was highlighted by China’s national broadcaster, CCTV, as a critical, innovative Chinese project that was developing super-pressure balloons.

Even if these balloons are used for meteorological research, the type of data they collect has straightforward military applications. Indeed, a PLA policy document in 2016 called for the construction of meteorological infrastructure to be integrated and standardised within the military.

The helium blimps that Kuang-Chi builds can, it claims, capture high-definition images and navigational information such as a ship’s number, registry, latitude and longitude, course and speed. The company suggests its balloons have greater aerial surveillance capacity than traditional surveillance platforms. In 2015, the company’s ‘Cloud’ blimp acquired data from more than 2,000 ships from around 28 countries and regions in the South China Sea (see figure 1). This information would be valuable during a conflict to track an adversary’s warships and would be cheaper and quicker to deploy than satellites. On the other hand, this technology could plug the gap in many states’ maritime domain awareness.