As Beijing stepped up its rhetoric against Taiwan yesterday, an official Chinese newspaper has boasted that if a real war broke out, China would crush resistance on the island in four or five days.
At the same time Hong Kong newspapers carried alarmist reports about a planned sea blockade of Taiwan by China, the possible seizure by Chinese troops of a small Taiwan-held island close to the Chinese coast, and increased submarine presence in the Taiwan Strait.
Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po newspaper warned that a blockade of Taiwan could wreck the island's economy.
China's leadership had decided to use "an appropriate degree of force against Taiwan, possibly including the occupation of an outlying island", said the South China Morning Post.
It claimed the Chinese leadership had decided to act "should Taipei authorities refuse to abandon Taiwan President Lee Tenghui's `two states theory' ".
President Lee sparked the crisis on July 9th when he tried to break out of diplomatic isolation imposed by Beijing by saying that relations between mainland China and Taiwan should be on a "special state-to-state" basis. This was seen by China, which regards Taiwan as a breakaway province, as abandoning the one-China policy under which China hopes to bring about eventual unity.
The most likely island targets are three heavily fortified Taiwan islands, Kinmin (formerly Quemoy), Matsu and Wuchie, which lie just off the coast of China's Fujian province and came under artillery bombardment by communist troops in 1958.
The Post said the Chinese Communist Party's central military commission and the leading group on Taiwan had been empowered to decide on the timing as well as severity of the military action to be taken by the 2.5 million-strong People's Liberation Army.
The claim that China could overrun Taiwan in five days was published in the China Business Times News Weekly, under a front page banner headline asking: "How many days can the 400,000-man `Nationalist army' resist?" Using pictures of fighter planes and missiles , it asserted: "Once war breaks out, resistance would be four to five days at the most."
It said speculation that China would not go to war because it was in the midst of economic development was "completely wrong".
However western defence analysts say that Taiwan, with its modern American and European weapons, could easily resist a seaborne invasion.
Policy on Taiwan is said to dominate debate among China's leadership as they confer at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, with hardliners favouring action around the 50th anniversary of the founding of communist China on October 1st and moderates urging patience until Taiwan's presidential elections next March to see if the new Taiwan president will reverse the move towards independence.
Some observers say the curbing of Taiwanese enthusiasm for independence in the run-up to the elections is precisely the aim of China's belligerence.