Hi, this is John in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I'm starting my two-hour drive to LaGuardia to pick up my long-distance boyfriend flying in from Houston for his first visit to the city.

This podcast was recorded at...

12.09 pm on Friday, February 10th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but also be taking them out to restaurants and teaching them how to pronounce past shunk,

Google and Consha Hakan. Okay, good show. I thought this was going to be Super Bowl related. I did too. I'm not sure that his boyfriend is understands when he's about to get into in Philadelphia the weekend of the Super Bowl, but good luck to you both.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Tamra Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

And NPR China correspondent John Ruich is here. Hey John. Hey guys. Hey hey.

The Biden administration has started to share what it is learning from the debris of the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down a week ago off the South Carolina coast.

Sue, members of Congress were given a classified briefing this week. So what do we know now?

You know what's so fascinating about this interaction is that oftentimes administrations keep things under wraps and they've actually been quite forthcoming.

They've classified a ton of information to the public even ahead of these briefings on the hill. They disclosed a lot of what they know about the Chinese balloon.

They disclosed, for instance, that the balloon was capable of intelligence collection and geo locating. They disclosed the size and scape of it, even the design of it. They disclosed that it had antenna and solar panels.

They also disclosed that the company that built the balloon has links to the Chinese military very squarely putting the blame on China and saying we know it was them. We know it was an intelligence operation.

We know it wasn't a weather balloon. Exactly. They also, a number of Pentagon officials testified in public before the Senate this week. And you know, there's a lot of anger on Capitol Hill about this. And we can talk more about that.

There was also a lot of questioning in public of Pentagon officials about why it took them so long to shoot it down. Also, obviously a big topic of lawmakers in their classified briefings as well.

What the Pentagon officials said, and this did seem to modify summer publicans, is that they detected the balloon over Alaska on January 28th. And they were aware of its movements until it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina days later.

What they testified was that the risk of intelligence collection to the government seemed relatively low, but the risk of shooting it down over land that could potentially have people casualties below was higher. So they just made a risk calculation.

And that did seem to modify at least one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, came out and said that he thought that the Biden administration had full-simly answered that question.

So John, how is China dealing with all of this? China's reaction has been pretty interesting. They were a little flat-footed on this when the story broke last week. But early on, they expressed regret over this thing floating. They said unintentionally over US airspace.

The Secretary of State, Blinken, was planning to travel to China just days after that, and the interpretation of many watch Chinese that this was sort of an attempt to keep that trip on the books, it was since post-poned.

And since then, China's messaging has been a bit colder. It's been very disciplined, the foreign ministry daily briefings, which are pretty much the only opportunity that foreign reporters have to ask any Chinese government official about anything.

It's come up day after day, and their reaction, their response has been like a recording. It was an unintentional entry into US airspace by civilian airship for reasons that we couldn't control. The US has overreacted.

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