CAMPAIGNING for Taiwan's historic presidential elections entered its final hours yesterday as the sabre rattling it has spawned between China and the US continued relentlessly.
Taiwan goes to the polls today in the island's first direct elections to choose a president, and the campaign closed at midnight last night (4 p.m. Irish time).
China, infuriated by the US sending more warships to seas off Taiwan, said it was putting off a planned visit by its Defence Minister, Mr Chi Haotian, to Washington as the climate was not right.
The official news agency Xinhua quoted military sources as saying. "The US government's recent actions in connection with the Taiwan Strait" had aggravated tensions there and those actions had "wantonly" interfered in China's internal affairs.
A US fleet including aircraft carrier Nimitz, steamed closer to waters off Taiwan, where it will link up with other another fleet including the Independence, over the weekend in a show of support for, Taiwan in the face of war games and threats of invasion by China. It will be the biggest US fleet assembled in Asia since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
President Lee Teng hui of Taiwan cheered the approach of the nuclear powered US aircraft carrier Nimitz and jeered at the Chinese war games.
Mr Lee, sounding ever more belligerent towards China ahead of his expected emphatic victory over three other contestants in the election, referred for the first time to the imminent arrival of the Nimitz and its battle group.
Some people "said the Nimitz's coming close to Taiwan is foreign intervention. It's because they don't understand that democratic countries should take care of democratic countries," Mr Lee told a campaign rally in the southern Taiwan port of Kaohsiung.
He scoffed at the Chinese missile tests and military manoeuvres off Taiwan aimed at cowing Taiwanese voters into rejecting ideas of making the wealthy island independent.
"We are voting for president and you [Beijing] are holding war games, to disrupt our elections. This has not worked," he said. He asked his audience if the manoeuvres had any effect, and the crowd roared back. "NO".
The elections, the first in which ordinary Taiwanese vote for their leader, climax Taiwan's march towards full democracy.
China says the vote is a plot to engineer independence for an island it regards as its own province. Mr Lee denies that he has abandoned a goal to reunify with the mainland.
Beijing backed media yesterday, appeared to give the naval movements more significance than the Taiwan elections, against which it has unleashed a barrage of propaganda in recent weeks. Hong Kong's pro China Wen Wei Po newspaper said Beijing had complete control over the Taiwan Strait.
"The People's Liberation Army has completed several combat plans, including a strategy to repel the entry of a foreign force," it said, quoting military experts.
"From the point of view of the exercises, even in the event of the entry of a foreign force, the People's Liberation Army has the capability to control the Taiwan Strait," it added.
"Uncle Sam is up to his" old tricks again," said the Defence Daily, a Chinese Defence Ministry mouthpiece, in the latest of a series of nationalistic anti US diatribes carried by state media.
However, the Pentagon has said the strait is an international waterway and has left open the possibility that the Nimitz may enter it.
The Prime Minister of Taiwan, Mr Lien Chan, said he did not expect China's manoeuvres in the strait to end soon.
"There currently is no sign that communist China's series of military exercises will completely stop. The current status will probably continue for some time," Mr Lien was quoted as saying.
Taiwan's Defence Ministry said last night that there were no signs, of any new war games in the strait, although it said more were expected