Keeping up with China’s various space programmes is rapidly becoming a full-time occupation for Western intelligence agencies. As the latest leaks of United States classified Pentagon papers reveal, Washington was hardly surprised by the appearance of what it claimed was a Chinese spying balloon in early February.

In reality, the Americans knew and had been tracking China’s balloons for years; the operation was so well established that the Pentagon even had a system assigning code names to each tracked balloon, inspired by the names of notorious US criminals.