China and Russia flag true agendas

By Hamish McDonaldBeijingAugust 22, 2005

A PARACHUTE drop by Russian special forces at a Chinese Army training ground has signalled an intensifying challenge by two former communist rivals to the US strategic presence in Asia.
The 86 Russian paratroopers dropped near Weifang City on the Shandong Peninsula, jutting out of China's north-east coast into the Yellow Sea, on Saturday as part of eight days of unprecedented joint exercises.
Before they end on Thursday, the drills will see more jumps by airborne forces, Chinese and Russian marines storming ashore, cruise missile launches by Russian Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bombers, Russian air tankers refuelling Chinese fighters, and ships and submarines imposing a simulated naval blockade.
All this, codenamed Peace Mission 2005, is supposed to be an anti-terrorist exercise.
China's first proposed location, the coast of Fujian province facing Taiwan, would have made its main interest a little clearer. The Russians, anxious not to be dragged into a war over the island republic, wanted the war games on the border of landlocked Xinjiang, in China's north-west.
Shandong, the compromise, is closer to China's objective. A Russian military source, quoted by the Japanese news agency Kyodo, said: "This scenario envisages blitzing into Taiwan's nerve centres while enforcing naval blockades for containing the US military's intervention."
Wu Min-chieh, a writer for Hong Kong's Communist Party-linked newspaper Wen Wei Po, said the exercises had multiple objectives — showing off the level of military co-operation between China and Russia; demonstrating the ability to intervene in Korea, just across the Yellow Sea; and deterring independence forces in Taiwan.
Other analysts see it as continuing pressure by the two powers to force the US out of its military presence in central Asia as part of the Afghanistan invention since 2001, especially following Uzbekistan's recent order for the US to quit an air base.
Russia, which has traded territory with China along the Amur River border, the 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.
The exercise is also a chance to show 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. Only the central Asian republics in the Chinese-led Shanghai Co-operation Agreement are allowed to watch, along with SCO observer countries — India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia — that Beijing and Moscow would like to lure away from US influence.
The Americans are still getting a close look — having sent two EP-3 spy planes and at least two ships into the area, according to reports from Washington.
"We're very interested in the exercise," said Admiral Gary Roughead, the new US Fleet Commander in the Pacific.