China's war games also send message to Taiwan

By Hamish McDonald Herald Correspondent in Beijing
August 22, 2005

A parachute drop by Russian special forces at a Chinese army training ground has signalled a growing challenge by two former communist rivals to the US strategic presence in Asia.

The 86 Russian paratroopers dropped on Saturday near Weifang city on the Shandong peninsula jutting out of China's north-east coast into the Yellow Sea, at the culmination of eight days of joint exercises.

Before this anti-terrorist exercise - codenamed Peace Mission 2005 - winds up on Thursday, there will be more jumps by airborne forces from both countries, Chinese and Russian marines storming ashore, cruise missile launches and ships and submarines imposing a simulated naval blockade.

China's original proposed location - the coast of Fujian province facing Taiwan - would have made its main aim clearer. The Russians, anxious not to be dragged into a war over the island republic, wanted the wargames on the border of landlocked Xinjiang, in China's north-west.

Shandong, the compromise, is closer to China's objective. The Japanese news agency Kyodo in Vladivostok quoted a Russian military source saying last week: "This scenario envisages blitzing into Taiwan's nerve-centres while enforcing naval blockades for containing the US military's intervention."

A writer in Hong Kong's communist party-linked newspaper Wen Wei Po, Wu Min-chieh, said on Friday the exercises had multiple objectives - showing off the level of military co-operation between China and Russia, showing the ability to intervene in Korea just across the Yellow Sea, and deterring independence forces in Taiwan.

Other analysts see it as continuing pressure to force the US out of its recent military lodgment in Central Asia as part of the Afghanistan invention since 2001, following Uzbekistan's recent order for the US to quit an air base.

Russia, which recently traded territory with China along the Amur River border, scene of large-scale Sino-Soviet military clashes a little over 30 years ago, is also using the exercise to show it remains a formidable military power in the region, despite the declining Russian population in its resource-rich Far East.

It is also a chance to showcase some of the weapons it hopes to sell to the Chinese, including the Tu-22 bomber, aerial tankers, and airborne radar planes.

American defence attaches, like those of its allied countries including Australia, have not been invited to observe.

The Americans however, are still getting a close look at the exercise, having sent two EP-3 spy planes and at least two ships into the area, according to reports from Washington.
