I had a work-study job in college at our small local airport working for the FAA. I mostly clipped new FAA communications into 3-ring binders and tore off expired ticker tape weather reports for a couple of hours a day.
My boss was old school government employee, straight and square. One day we were talking and he handed me a FAA business card with a UFO reporting 800 phone number. Odd I thought, and put it in my wallet.
Years later I lost my wallet in a phone booth (am old). I got a call from someone who found my wallet and wanted to return it. He came over with the wallet which had everything still in it, including cash. The only thing missing was the UFO card. I've never seen another one.
I'm guessing it's a total nothingburger and that these baloons are almost completely inconsequential.
China has satellites, so do they really need balloons to spy on the US? They are probably just weather balloons, and even if they are not, the info they're gathering vs the info China can already get from their satellites, or hell, from Chinese Nationals in the US, instructed to deploy a drone, is probably barely worth the cost of shooting them down.
In all likelihood, these things are probably always up there, all the time, have been for years, and someone just now decided to raise a kerfuffle about them.
I highly doubt anything of real significance is actually going on.
The Chinese response was amusing - they didn't deny spying with balloons, but rather said 'You STARTED it by spying on US with balloons!' - which the US denied.
Is the US lying, and they are floating spy balloons over China? Again, it seems unlikely because satellites exist, but it could be exactly the sort of response testing you're thinking of, going both ways.
The funniest possibility, of course, is that the winds are blowing both American and Chinese weather balloons out over each other's territory, and both nations think each other's weather balloons are spy balloons, because of course they do.
anything chinese outside their borders is primarily for espionage.
Yes, but you realize balloons go wherever the wind carries them, right?
I'm on-board with the "they've always been there" position. I do think they have their uses though. We don't actually know how good China's spy satellites are, so that alone could justify sending out a balloon to observe a few key locations. Besides, balloons are so much cheaper, and how we go about shooting one down could be the info they're meant to gather in the first place. That could mean observing our weapons and reaction times, or by agents within the military observing how that information is collected and acted upon. Hell, in 2023, both sides are probably collecting information on how we react to it.