The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.

For Washington, the espionage efforts are a critical part of President Biden’s strategy to constrain the military and technological rise of China, in line with his thinking that the country poses the greatest long-term challenge to American power.

But critics say some of the U.S. government’s counterintelligence efforts are racially biased and paranoid, amounting to a new Red Scare — a charge at least partly supported by the cases the Justice Department has had to drop and by its shutdown of the Trump-era China Initiative program.

And while American officials refuse to discuss details of the agency’s network of informants, Mr. Burns said publicly in July that it had made progress on rebuilding a “strong human intelligence capability.”

While it is unclear how robust the new network is, some U.S. officials think Mr. Xi’s extremely authoritarian governance style gives intelligence agencies an opening to recruit disaffected Chinese citizens, including from among the political and business elite who had benefited in previous decades from less party control and a less ideological leadership.

More recently, a sophisticated, highly targeted penetration of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform gave China access to the emails of senior State Department diplomats, including the American ambassador in Beijing and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

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