BEIJING — China’s ceremonial parliament has accused American lawmakers of trampling on the sovereignty of different nations after the U.S. handed a measure condemning a suspected Chinese language spy balloon’s intrusion into U.S. airspace.

The assertion issued Thursday by the Nationwide Folks’s Congress’s International Affairs Committee repeated Beijing’s insistence that the balloon was an unmanned civilian climate analysis airship, a declare the U.S. has dismissed citing its flight route and payload of surveillance tools.

Whereas China at first expressed remorse over the Feb. 4 incident, it has toughened its rhetoric in an extra signal of how badly relations between the perimeters have deteriorated lately.

On Wednesday, the International Ministry stated it should take measures towards U.S. entities someway associated to the downing of the balloon, with out giving particulars.

The decision earlier handed unanimously by the U.S. Home of Representatives “intentionally exaggerated the ‘China risk,'” the International Relations Committee assertion stated.

That was “purely malicious hype and political manipulation,” it stated. “Some U.S. Congress politicians fanned the flames, absolutely exposing their sinister designs to oppose China and comprise China.”

“The truth is, it’s america that wantonly interferes in different international locations’ inside affairs, violates their sovereignty, and conducts surveillance on different international locations,” it stated.

A spread of Chinese language authorities departments have issued every day protests over how the U.S. dealt with the problem, accusing Washington of overreacting and violating “the spirit of worldwide legislation.” Beijing has provided no particulars on what firm or authorities division was liable for the enormous balloon, the remnants of that are being despatched to an FBI lab for evaluation.

Together with Congress’s passing of the decision, the U.S. has sanctioned six Chinese language entities it stated are linked to Beijing’s aerospace applications. Secretary of State Antony Blinken additionally canceled a go to to Beijing, placing an abrupt freeze on what some had seen as momentum for a stabilization in relations which have plunged to their lowest in a long time amid disputes over commerce, human rights, Taiwan and China’s declare to the South China Sea.

The Home decision condemned China for a “brazen violation” of U.S. sovereignty and efforts to “deceive the worldwide neighborhood by means of false claims about its intelligence assortment campaigns.”

U.S. officers have stated China operates a fleet of such balloons, that are a comparatively cheap and difficult-to-detect technique of gathering intelligence. The U.S. authorities decided the balloon posed little threat to nationwide safety and allowed it to fly throughout the continent earlier than bringing it down with a missile off the coast of South Carolina.