CHINA yesterday denounced Taiwan’s threat to retaliate against an invasion of the island by smashing the enormous Three Gorges Dam.
If Taiwan were to carry out the threat, revealed earlier this month, to attack the dam with a cruise missile and fighter jets, a million mainland Chinese could drown in the surging waters of the 400-mile (643km) reservoir above the world’s largest hydroelectric dam.
A tidal wave would wash several hundred miles downstream and also inland, endangering cities such as Wuhan, with five million inhabitants.
Liu Yang, a Chinese general, said yesterday that his country’s response would be to annihilate Taiwan. “It will provoke retaliation that will blot out the sky and cover up the earth,” he wrote in the China Youth Daily, using a Chinese idiom.
The re-election of President Chen Shuibian of Taiwan for a second four-year term in March has heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait, prompting analysts to give warning that a military conflict was no longer a distant threat. A Beijing-based defence attaché said: “The possibility of a conflict in the next four years cannot be dismissed.”
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For decades Taiwan invested in American defence technology primarily designed to keep the People’s Liberation Army off its beaches and airfields, regarding a counter-attack strategy as being too provocative. However, the combination of a combative Taiwanese President and a strongly pro-Taiwan Pentagon, which arms and advises Taipei, has led to a new appraisal of how to counter Beijing’s growing legion of Russian-made tanks and frigates, plus 500 medium-range missiles aimed at Taiwan.
Alarmed by Beijing’s denunciation of an attack on the dam, the Taiwanese Defence Ministry, played down the plans. A spokesman said: “I don’t think that the Three Gorges would be our focal point.”