What on earth was Xi Zinping thinking?

Looking at the spy balloon saga from the Beijing end one has to ask the question: what on earth was President Xi Zinping thinking when he presumably said, yes ok let's send one of those nice big spy balloons over Montana a couple of days before the arrival of the US secretary of state Antony Blinken. Was he being deliberately provocative, trying to show Washington that he can do what he wants whenever he wants and stuff diplomatic relations? Or was he just being outrageously irresponsible and stupid? Or was he actually thinking to himself: let's put up a spy balloon and see how long it takes the US air force to shoot it down because that might give me an idea how long Anerica might take to react to an invasion of Taiwan? I reckon it's the last one. If the US waits three or four or five days to decide to send a naval task force to help Taiwan defend against a Chinese invasion that might just be enough for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to launch a massive assault and overpower the breakaway, self-governing republic before a US carrier appears on the horizon. Could that be Xi's thinking? If so, then Biden and the Pentagon played into his hands. Biden said yes to shooting the balloon down but the Pentagon advised waiting until it was safely flying over water. Perfectly understandable on the Pentagon's part, not wishing to risk anyone on the ground being hit by falling debris. But I know for absolutely sure that if a US spy balloon was spotted flying over a Chinese missile site it would be shot down immediately as a demonstration of Chinese outrage, never mind bits coming down onto people's heads. The Americans could be blamed for that. So this was all about testing the United States, and the lesson Xi learned from this whole incident was that Americans are too nice and take collateral damage very seriously. So, athough it looks as if the Chinese blundered with their spy balloon - and lost it in the Atlantic - in fact Xi will have been very satisfied with his little gamble. And he will win support from all the allies he has bribed with billions of dollars of construction programmes by ringing them to tell them that the balloon was simply checking the weather and how outrageous it was that the Americans went to war against this innocent airborne climate-change investigating system. Oh yes, I see it all now.