CHINA began new war games in the Taiwan Strait yesterday, using jets and warships to press home its point that Taiwan must not try to become an independent state.
Beijing's began live fire exercises involving 10 warships and a dozen warplanes in bombing and interception missions, Taiwan's Defence Ministry said.
The Taiwanese defence ministry reported the drill started at noon (4 p.m Irish time) near Chinese islands lying in a vast 6,120 mile zone chosen by Beijing for the nine day manoeuvres.
The Chinese ministry added bad weather had prevented an extension of air operations.
No Chinese aircraft or ship had gone beyond the exercise zone, it said, denying a press report that a Chinese plane had flown close to Penghu, a Taiwanese island in the middle of the strait.
The manoeuvres, the fifth in eight months, are scheduled to end on March 20th, three days before the first democratic presidential elections in Taiwan's history.
Taipei says the exercises are a blatant attempt to scare voters away from President Lee Tenghui and other candidates Beijing says favour independence for Taiwan, an island that it considers a rebel province.
Part of the zone is just 32 miles from Taiwan's fortress island of Kinmen (Quemoy), which lies just 1.5 miles off the coast of China's Fujian province. Another is 42 miles from Penghu.
Military forces in Penghu and Kinmen have been on top alert since Friday, when China began a week long missile exercise by firing three surface to surface weapons into the sea just north and south of Taiwan.
Military forces in Kinmen also stepped up their combat readiness yesterday, recalling troops on leave to their barracks and increasing live ammunition exercises, including artillery firing at uninhabited islets nearby, local sources said.
China angrily criticised the United States after Washington dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to monitor the crisis.
The commander of the nearest group, Admiral James Ellis, told CNN his force was located "about over 200 miles to the east" of Taiwan and would "remain at this location for the foreseeable future. We have no plans to move at all."
In Beijing, a foreign ministry spokesman, Mr Shen Guofing, said "the US should be careful not to send a wrong message to the Taiwanese authorities that it supports the separatist activities."
"If the Taiwanese authorities misinterpret that message, there could be real danger," he said.
Chinese newspapers prominently reported a speech on Monday by President Jiang Zemin, who demanded unstinting military support for the party and urged the army to boost its fighting capacity to meet its new "tasks" - a reference to the reunification of China and Taiwan.
US officials have warned repeatedly of unspecified "grave consequences should China launch an unprovoked strike on the island.
But pressed about just how far Washington would go, US officials quote verbatim the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) which promises to help Taiwan defend itself but stops far short of making any security guarantees.
Rather, the TRA pledges to view any effort to determine Taiwan's future by "other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes" as "a threat to the peace and security of the western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States."
To fulfil its pledge, the US has over the last 17 years provided technical aid and weapons to Taiwan and maintained friendly ties through unofficial representative offices in each capital.
A muddled US China policy dictated largely by domestic politics has helped propel long simmering tensions over Taiwan to their current near crisis level, experts say.
Nor has Washington's refusal to spell out its likely response to an unprovoked Chinese attack on Taiwan succeeded in cooling increasingly heated rhetoric and menacing war games in the region, they say.
In part to clarify just how seriously it views China's ongoing military manoeuvres, the administration this week ordered a second naval aircraft carrier group to join a battle group already off Taiwan in one of the largest shows of US military force in the region since the Vietnam war.