To defame China before the world has actually become one of the major purposes of the U.S. composing and releasing of its annual report on China's military power, said Jin Yinan, vice director of the strategic teaching and research section of the National Defense University.

The U.S. Department of Defense issued on May 23 its 2006 China Military Power Report, being the seventh of its kind since 2000, and, we should say, the only report on another country's military might issued by a government.

The report claimed that China's military expansion has come to a degree to endanger regional balance, and the PLA's surgical strike capability might even pose a threat to traditional advantages of the U.S. forces. At a regular press conference on May 24, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao expressed strong indignation and opposition to this report full of "China threat" theory.

From 2000 to 2006, what has changed in this report and what not?

What remains unchanged is the containment policy towards China, while in U.S. estimation on China's military might have kept growing, Jin told a CCTV news program. At the beginning the report claimed disdainfully that China was totally unable to threaten Taiwan substantially, but now it said a disastrous impact on the island is perfectly possible. This is a big change, Jin said.

Another point is that the report believes China's military influence has extended from Taiwan to the whole region.

In this openly published 2006 report, said Jin, the writers were totally on the U.S. side when they evaluated the trend of China's military development. They also described the cross-Straits relations provocatively by saying that Beijing still takes Taiwan as its biggest hypothetical enemy and it has deployed a third of its military power alongside the Straits.

The report also cooked up theories that China's military modernization trend will enable it to launch a series of operations in Asia, instead of on Taiwan alone.

By People's Daily Online