Taipei Times: What exactly is China's ambition?

US President George W. Bush's recent visit to Asia made little news -- by design. But that's because Bush didn't begin to address the issue that is looming ever larger in the region: the changing face of security in Asia in view of China's growing economic and military might.

This summer, for example, China and Russia conducted their first ever grand-scale joint military exercise. This was followed by Russian news reports that China, Russia and India would conduct trilateral military exercises, named "Indira 2005," on the same scale before the end of this year.

In the past, such a combination of countries was almost unthinkable, and these exercises cannot be explained away as simple "one-off" affairs with little resonance. Instead, they reflect China's long-term strategic goal of establishing hegemony across Asia.

One tool of this ambition is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), under which the Sino-Russian exercises took place. Established in June 2001, the SCO includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The SCO's original purpose was to mitigate tensions on the borders of China and the Central Asian countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrival of US military forces with the war in Afghanistan.

China regards the SCO as a stage for broadening its influence over a vast region, ranging from the Asia-Pacific to Southwest Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, its members include about 45 percent of the world's population, and 28 percent of the landmass ranging across the Eurasian continent.

China's active leadership of the SCO has resulted in policies that it favors. Gradually, the SCO shifted its focus to fighting Islamic radicals. Nowadays, however, the SCO is often used as a forum to campaign against supposed US unilateralism and to provide a united front -- especially between China and Russia -- against the US with respect to security and arms-reduction issues in the region. This includes joint anti-terror training and demands to reduce US forces in the region, particularly from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The SCO provides China not only with a platform to confront the existing US-led alliance in the Asia-Pacific region, but is increasingly being used to prevent the formation of a US-led network to restrain China's advance. Ultimately, it is feared that the SCO could develop into a military alliance similar to the Warsaw Pact of the Cold War era, with an embryonic "Great China Union" at its core.

Read the rest of the author's opinion at here.

Remember, grain of salt. This is coming from Taiwan and they certainly have a different view of Beijing's activities than may be reality. It is in their interest to stir the pot between the US and PRC. They are supposed to be an errant province or legimate government of China depending on the point of view. They have to dance a might fine jig to keep their position from going too much one way or the other enough to provoke the PRC yet keep the US as its protector.