BEIJING
- China has dispatched heavily armed troops to the Three
Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, to
guard against any terrorist attack, a newspaper said yesterday.
The forces had begun patrolling waters
near the $25 billion project in central Hubei province,
built also to tame the flood-prone Yangtze River, the
online edition of Huaxia, or China Times, said.
The dam was first proposed decades ago,
but construction was delayed because late Communist Party
chairman Mao Zedong wanted to ensure the People's Liberation
Army (PLA) could defend it against any attack by Chiang
Kai-shek's Nationalist troops.
Soldiers manning the dam had been equipped
with armed helicopters, airships, armoured vehicles and
robots to defuse bombs, the newspaper said.
"The move symbolises the completion
of the deployment of armed, anti-terror troops at big
bridges, dams and hydropower plants along large rivers,"
the paper said.
China
has trained its anti-terror forces with "powerful
style, flexible command and specific strengths",
it said.
In June, the official China Youth Daily
quoted PLA Lieutenant-General Liu Yuan, a son of late
president Liu Shaoqi, as saying China would be "seriously
on guard against threats from Taiwan independence terrorists".
His comments came in response to the U.S.
Pentagon's annual report to Congress on China's military
power, which said unnamed proponents of strikes against
China "apparently hope" that merely establishing
places like the Three Gorges Dam as targets would deter
Chinese military coercion.
China has considered Taiwan a breakaway
province that must be returned to the fold, by force if
necessary, since their split at the end of the Chinese
civil war in 1949 when the Nationalists fled to the island.
Construction of the dam finally began
in 1993 and engineers blocked the Yangtze at the Three
Gorges Dam in June last year, a point of national pride
in a country desperate for electricity but which critics
fear will become an environmental disaster.
China staged anti-terror manoeuvres in
the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on Sunday, citing a rise
in global terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
on the United States.
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