Beijing warns U.S. over 'wrong signals'

The Pentagon report says the PLA's budget is the biggest in Asia

(CNN) -- Beijing has asked the United States not to send the "wrong signals" to Taiwan by playing up the military gap between China and the island.

In its just-released report on Chinese military capabilities, the Pentagon said the fast-modernizing People's Liberation Army (PLA) was gaining "an increasing number of credible options to intimidate or actually attack Taiwan." (Full story)

Following the communist victory on the mainland in 1949, the nationalists fled to Taiwan, an island off the Chinese coast. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and intends to reunify the island with the mainland, by force if necessary.

China fears that Taiwan's permanent separation from the mainland could serve as a strategic foothold for the United States, the Defense Department has said in its report.

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U.S. policy has been to help Taiwan maintain a defense capability, but Washington does not favor Taiwanese independence.

Pentagon and other U.S. officials have indicated Washington will sell sophisticated weapons to Taiwan to help maintain a rough balance of forces in the Taiwan Strait.

But in a statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said the Pentagon had given a distorted picture of the PLA, "whose budget is the lowest among the world's major countries."

The report said that at US$65 billion the annual PLA budget was the biggest in Asia, and that the Chinese had benefited from large procurements of Russian arms.

Kong said Beijing was pursuing a policy of peaceful reunification with Taiwan under the "one country, two systems" formula.

The Pentagon report would "send wrong signals to separatists in Taiwan" because the latter would be emboldened by promises of American support, he added.

'Unfriendly attention'

A top America expert at the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Hong Yuan, said the Pentagon report was a product of "unfriendly attention" and "cold war mentality."

Hong was quoted by the Chinese media as saying the report was "a pretext [for the U.S.] to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan, which is a reflection of the interests of the American military-industrial establishment."

Cross-straits relations have remained relatively calm in recent months, with Beijing and Taipei trying to seek a formula for implementing direct transport, mail and business links.

Meanwhile, the official Chinese media has in the past week run several pieces on the research and development of new weapons in the U.S.

Military commentators have criticized U.S. President George W. Bush's doctrine of possibly undertaking "pre-emptive strikes" against terrorists and their supporters.