The "upset" part is a defensive attack, they expect to avoid rebuffs of violating airspace by being very upset in the first place.

Well it gives a good excuse to shoot down US spy balloons or planes. The precedence has been set, and the snowball continue to roll downwards.

That precedence was set way back in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union started shooting at US U-2 spy planes, and especially in 1960 when they finally succeeded in shooting down the US U-2 spy plane with pilot Gary Powers.

This overflight was termed by the Soviets as an "Act of aggression". This Chinese incident is no less an act of aggression, and merely continues the precedent.

If the Chinese really wanted it considered otherwise because they had actually lost control of the device, they could have easily warned us of the problem and requested coordinated assistance in recovering their device (which would of course allow us to examine it). The PRC govt did no such thing.

And the critics complaining about not shooting it down sooner are ignoring two key things. First, the payload was 2-4 school-busses in length, and dropping such a thing from 12+ miles up in a random location even in sparsely populated areas is a ridiculous hazard. Second, we can be quite confident that the US military could neutralize any data collection or transmission during the transit, and the shoot-down over our waters eliminated the possibility of PRC recovering any stored data.

The only thing I find strange is that they didn't throw in something about hurting the feelings of the Chinese people[0] for good measure. They like to call this Wolf Warrior diplomacy; but it really comes across more as crying wolf diplomacy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurting_the_feelings_of_the_...