Hainan, the Chinese island that sends spy balloons to the five continents

• LUCAS OF THE CAL

  Asian correspondent

  @lucasdelacal

Updated Thursday, February 9, 2023-19:20

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• Conflict US shoots down Chinese 'surveillance' balloon

• Wide Angle Downing of spy balloon intensifies Cold War between US and China

If the United States has Hawaii,

since the Asian country finally opened all its doors at the beginning of January and allowed an exception with tourist visas for its northern neighbors. They could spend the winter at more than 30 degrees in the Chinese pearl that is treading Southeast Asia.

As well as a haven for Russian friends, Beijing is turning this 35,000 square kilometer island into its new darling: an independent customs system by 2025, the world's largest free trade port by 2035, lower taxes to attract investors, companies and foreign talents.

And it is expected that, in a couple of years, more than 3,000 high-tech companies will establish themselves on the island.

In short, if all goes according to the plans of the bosses of the second world power, this place is shaping up in the future as a new financial (and technological) center in Asia.

Hainan, due to its strategic position in the always disputed South China Sea, is also one of the most important bases of operations of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

In Sanya, the southernmost city on the island, it is common to see maneuvers by soldiers from the Eastern Theater Command, the section of the army that watches over that region, with an eye mainly on the next Taiwan.

In Hainan there is an airfield from where some of the most advanced Chinese fighters take off.

, especially through critical points for China such as the United States, India, Taiwan and Japan.

The latter is what US intelligence officials have assured the

this week , putting on the map the unknown - outside of Asia - Hainan island, indicated as the base from which surveillance balloons leave like the one that entered in US airspace, causing a new earthquake in the already turbulent relations between the two superpowers, and which was shot down last Saturday in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina.

The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who canceled his trip to Beijing hours before taking off his flight due to the spy balloon crisis, has also pointed out that the downed object would be part of a larger spy fleet spread throughout the world. .

," Blinken said.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Defense Department spokesman General Pat Ryder confirmed that the US believed similar balloons had been operated in North and South America, Southeast and East Asia, and Europe. .

"What the Chinese have done is take incredibly old technology and basically combine it with modern communications and observation capabilities to try to obtain intelligence on the armed forces of other nations," the intelligence sources explained to the

,

(near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam), plus the last one last week, those that have flown over US territory in recent years.

The officials added that the US was sharing information gathered from the balloon pieces found with "dozens of countries."

Navy and Coast Guard ships and divers continue to search for all the wreckage.

In Beijing, this week they have continued to maintain that their "unmanned aircraft for civilian use" was simply a meteorological analysis device and have acknowledged that the second one that flew over Latin America was also theirs, apologizing even to the Government of Costa Rica, as well as what they did with Washington when the crisis broke out.

The Chinese media continue to take the issue to the ground that everything is an exaggeration and that the Biden administration is only trying to cloud what seemed to be a rapprochement in diplomatic relations with the visit of Blinken.

President Biden, on the other hand, in an interview a day after his State of the Union address, where he promised to "protect our country if China threatens our sovereignty," maintained that the spy balloon crisis

. .

"Despite the fact that China has repeatedly shared information about the unintentional entry of the civil aircraft, the US not only went ahead with the use of force to shoot down the aircraft, but also continued to promote the incident, creating more obstacles for relations. negotiations, which were already tense over numerous issues, including the technological crackdown on China and the Taiwan issue," said an editorial on Thursday in the

newspaper , which often plays the role of aggressive media mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party.

The

, like other Chinese newspapers that have an English edition, have continued these days to publish a few lines on the subject,

to questions from the international media in the daily press conference.

On the other hand, in the Mandarin press, or in the always controlled social networks of the Asian giant, the spy balloon crisis came almost as fast as it vanished.

Because behind closed doors, as a Chinese diplomat summarized for this newspaper, they only convey that Washington ("which sees its hegemony in danger in an increasingly divided world") does not stop desperately looking for a way to stop the "unstoppable" advance of China.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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