Take on the Goodyear Blimp

It's not clear to me that with all the technology available to them, why the Chinese would use a blimp to spy on the US. I read about the German zeppelin raids over England but those were done 85 years ago and were used as offensive weapons instead of surveillance. Plus that was before we had an inventory of super computers that would make Bill Gates blush.
I'm not sure what the deal with this thing but we definitely rattles some cages as taking this thing down is certainly seen as an aggressive act.

But I'm still not convinced that this was some kind of false flag.