The United States said that Xi Jinping did not know about balloons. More problems arise from this.

Hong Kong (CNN) — Washington believes the balloon shot down over the Atlantic on Saturday was part of a broader Chinese surveillance program, but Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in decades, may not have known about the mission.

The assessment, provided to U.S. lawmakers at a briefing on Thursday, if true, could indicate what analysts say is a serious lack of coordination within the Chinese system at a time of tension between the U.S. and China, CNN reported. -U.S.

The options in this situation — Xi Jinping knowing that a balloon was sent over the United States ahead of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing — raise a different set of concerns about China’s policy toward the United States.will pick up

That could mean Xi and his top advisers underestimated the potential gravity of the visit and the possibility that it could jeopardize a trip by Blinken, the top U.S. diplomat since 2018. It would have been a first, and would have been welcomed by Beijing. A way to ease tension.

China has so far provided little information to flesh out its version of events, saying the balloon was a Chinese civilian research plane that was blown off course and denying an extensive surveillance program.

In a statement late last week, Beijing linked the equipment to “enterprises,” rather than the government or the military, although the importance of China’s state-owned enterprises and powerful military-industrial complex blur the distinction between the two. limit. Do.

However, a senior State Department official said the US believed the balloon was part of a “Chinese fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” and that those activities were “typically led by the People’s Liberation Army (EPL)”. Finish. China “has flown these surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries on five continents,” the official said, without elaborating.

Regardless of whether the balloon is civilian or military, its position over the United States calls into question the extent to which Mr. Xi understands the potentially sensitive missions under his leadership within the sprawling but hierarchical Chinese system.

If the balloons flying over the United States were described as a coordinated military surveillance program by Washington, one possibility is that Xi knew about the program but not its day-to-day operations, analysts said.not about

Drew Thompson, a Singapore-based analyst, believes the situation could be exacerbated by Xi’s degree of control, which has consolidated his grip on power by entering an unprecedented third term at the helm of the Communist Party.

“The problem with centralization under Xi Jinping is the lack of empowerment at the lower levels,” said Thompson, a senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

This means that lower-level officials who may have the ability to oversee these missions more closely may not have the authority to do so, or may not be able to make political decisions about their impact. All right, he said. Power struggles between lower-level officials can also complicate communication, he said.

“There are tensions throughout the Chinese system; it’s a feature of Chinese governance where lower levels fight for autonomy and higher levels fight for more control,” he said.

Past crises in China have highlighted these tensions, such as the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 and more recently COVID-19, where delays in reporting are seen to have slowed the response and exacerbated the problem. Some blame local officials, who are either afraid of repercussions or accustomed to a system where information flows from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said balloon launches could also be buggy, with their operations not managed or monitored in the same way as space missions or other aircraft.

In such cases, the entity launching the balloons may face “little or no pressure from other countries, including the United States,” and “these launches are considered routine based on weather conditions and modest cost.” Yang said.

“So while leaders of these projects are also being encouraged to try new routes over time, they may not have been prioritized from a political risk standpoint,” he said.

Biden officials said they believed that even senior officials in the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party, including Xi Jinping, were not aware of the balloon mission over the United States, and that China was still trying to figure out how it happened. . A source familiar with Thursday’s congressional briefing told CNN.

China’s foreign ministry is reportedly unfazed by what emerged publicly last week, issuing its first explanation of the incident 12 hours after the Pentagon announced it had tracked a suspicious surveillance balloon. once.

However, some observers of China’s political elite suspect that Mr. Xi was unaware of the balloon being sent into U.S. airspace, or that lower-level officials carried out a mission without their knowledge that could affect U.S.-China relations.

“Because of his personality, he wants 100 percent (control),” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. “I don’t think Xi Jinping will allow that kind of autonomy.”

Instead, Mr. Xi may have taken comfort in diverting the attention of a frustrated public as the economy faltered under the recently collapsed Covid-zero policy, but he underestimated the domestic reaction in the US, causing talks to stall, Wu said.

Beijing accused the United States of “exaggerating” its decision to shoot down the balloon on Saturday.

At the same time, Wu said Washington could convey its message that Xi was unaware of the position of “continuing dialogue” proposed by Xi when he met with U.S. President Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Bali.

“They (China) may want to offer some face,” he said.

Nectar Gan, Jeremy Herb, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood, Manu Raju and CNN’s Haley Britsky contributed to this article.