China Daily has reported the exercises, but given no indication of when they would end.

The People's Liberation Army Daily newspaper said the exercises were being carried out in the Shenyang, Guangzhou, Beijing and Chengdu military command regions, simulating the deployment of troops hundreds of kilometers away.

Photos posted on official government websites showed navy transport ships carrying tanks and armoured personnel carriers, with the vehicles disembarking from the ships onto beaches.

The exercises began just after Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian scrapped unification guidelines with the mainland on Tuesday, a move that Beijing said would endanger peace in the Taiwan Strait and the Asia Pacific region.

Since nationalist armies fled to Taiwan following their civil war defeat to communist forces in 1949, China has viewed the island as a renegade province to be reunified, by force if necessary.

Beijing has insisted that formal Taiwan independence would mean war and has strongly warned Chen from making any moves in that direction.

The state press did not link the exercises to the heightened cross-strait tensions but Joseph Cheng, a noted China watcher at the City University of Hong Kong, told AFP, they were meant to be a low-key signal to the island.

"Certainly this is an attempt to exert pressure on Chen Shui-bian," Joseph Cheng said.

"Military exercises are probably seen as an appropriate warning at this stage."

Beijing needed to show it was being serious with Taiwan as delegates for the annual session of the National People's Congress gather in the capital that starts on Sunday, he said.

At the same time, China would not want to rachet up tensions too high and create a negative atmosphere for the summit between President Hu Jintao and his US counterpart George W. Bush in Washington next month, he said

"Chinese leaders want Bush to understand that they are exercising restraint. By showng this, they are in a better position to get the Bush administration to put pressure on Chen Shui-bian," he said.

China has previously staged much more intense military exercices in a bid to intimidate Taiwan's independence movement.

The bullying tactic backfired spectacularly in 1996 when Lee Teng-hui, much-vilified by Beijing, won Taiwan's first direct presidential vote despite missile tests intended to warn the island's voters against supporting him.

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