The Chinese surveillance balloon Joe Biden shot down last week was part of a global spy program aimed at gathering intelligence on the military capabilities of other nations.

That’s according to a trio of US officials who spoke to The New York Times.

On its face, that doesn’t sound like news, necessarily. Various reporting previously indicated a Chinese spy balloon over US territory wasn’t an unprecedented development, but the information passed along to the Times on Wednesday should be put in the context of fears that Xi Jinping is making war preparations.

Late last month, a US Air Force general penned a disconcerting memo warning that a confluence of events pointed to war with China in 2025. Tensions across the Taiwan Strait are obviously running high, and the balloon fiasco made the optics around Antony Blinken’s planned visit to Beijing impossible to manage. That trip was supposed to be an opportunity to deescalate simmering tensions between the world’s two superpowers, which are locked in an ideological and technological struggle for 21st century supremacy.

During his State of The Union address on Tuesday evening in the US, Biden delivered a series of blunt remarks about competition with China, and at one point started shouting at Xi through the television. “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping,” he demanded. “Name me one, name me one.”

Beijing wasn’t amused. “It is not the practice of a responsible country to smear a country or restrict the country’s legitimate development rights under the excuse of competition,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Nin said Wednesday.

“The balloon flights, some officials believe, are part of an effort by China to hone its ability to gather data about American military bases — in which it is most interested — as well as those of other nations in the event of a conflict or rising tensions,” the Times wrote, citing unnamed officials, who also said that prior to last week, the US “had tracked Chinese surveillance balloons collecting information from more than a dozen countries around the world.”

Apparently, three balloons were observed during the Trump administration, but they were initially classified as UFOs or, “unidentified aerial phenomena,” if you don’t like the X Files. Later, in 2020, a review of such phenomena concluded they were in fact “part of the Chinese global balloon surveillance effort,” as the Times went on to detail.

Needless to say, this raises additional questions about Xi’s intentions. Every major power spies on every other major power, of course, but rightly or wrongly, everything is contextualized vis-à-vis Taiwan.

On Wednesday, Beijing said the US should return any recovered balloon wreckage to sender. “If you pick up something on the street, you should return it to the owner, if you know who the owner is,” Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France explained. “If the Americans don’t want to return it, that’s their decision but it demonstrates their dishonesty.”