China is this week staging military exercises, Chinese state press said yesterday, coinciding with a spike in tensions with Taiwan and the start of the nation's annual parliamentary session.
The joint air force, army and navy exercises began on Wednesday and are aimed at simulating modern battle conditions using advanced information technology, the China Daily reported, without saying when they would end.
The People's Liberation Army Daily newspaper said the exercises were being carried out in the Shenyang, Guangzhou, Beijing and Chengdu military command regions, simulating the deployment of troops hundreds of kilometers away.
Photos posted on official government Web sites showed navy transport ships carrying tanks and armored personnel carriers, with the vehicles disembarking from the ships onto beaches.
The exercises began just after President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) move to cease the function of the National Unification Council (NUC) and guidelines on Tuesday, a move that Beijing said would endanger peace in the Taiwan Strait and the Asia Pacific region.
Beijing has insisted that formal Taiwan independence would mean war and has strongly warned Chen from moving in that direction.
The state press did not link the exercises to the heightened cross-strait tensions but Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩), a noted China watcher at the City University of Hong Kong, said they were meant to be a low-key signal to Taiwan.
"Certainly this is an attempt to put pressure on Chen," Cheng said.
"Military exercises are probably seen as an appropriate warning at this stage," he added.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
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