Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan's onslaught on Tuesday suggest these emotions are now being mixed with worries the new administration of President George W. Bush will be more eager to supply arms to Taiwan than the Clinton government, analysts said.

"The US side should come to the recognition of the serious dangers involved," Tang told a press conference Tuesday. "It should rein in its wild horse riding on the side of the precipice."

The rhetorical flurry came just weeks before annual US-Taiwan arms talks at which Taiwan is expected to unveil a shopping list of sophisticated weapons, including destroyers equipped with the Aegis satellite anti-missile system.

"China wants to put a marker early on in the Bush administration by saying, 'You may have different views than the Clinton administration, but we still take Taiwan seriously'," said Brian Bridges, an international relations scholar at Hong Kong's Lingnan College.

Tang's remark came as China itself unveiled an 18 percent rise in defense spending and could be meant to forestall US attempts to use this as an excuse to step up arms sales to Taiwan, said analysts.

But Tang's warning, by explicitly mentioning advanced equipment such as the Aegis or PAC-3 anti-missile systems, also revealed more substantial worries about the impact sales could have on the regional balance of power.

Aegis is a total weapon system, capable of detecting and destroying submarines, surface vessels, missiles and airplanes and centered around a powerful radar that can track more than 100 targets at a time.

It appears almost tailor-made to oppose a Chinese attempt to launch a military strike across the narrow Taiwan Straits.

An equally important worry from Chinese point of view is the possibility that a Taiwanese Aegis system would have to use US sattelite data to be efficient, according to Arthur Ding, an expert on the Chinese military at the Institute of International Relations, a Taipei-based think tank.

"If US sold Aegis to Taiwan, it would imply that Taiwan was part of the US alliance system in the region," he said. "I would say Aegis warships have both military functions and political symbolism."

China would consider a sale like that a far cry from what it sees as previous US commitments.

The United States and China in the 1970s and 1980s signed three communiques aimed at reaching a reasonable level of clarity on the Taiwan issue and enable Washington and Beijing to normalize relations.

In the third of the communiques, signed in August 1982, the United States said its arms sales to Taiwan would not exceed those of recent years and that it would "reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution."

That has been at odds with the Taiwan Relations Act, passed by a US Congress in 1979 to make up for the diplomatic shift from Taiwan to China, which calls for the United States to keep a balance in the Taiwan Straits.

Analysts pointed out that this part of the Act was invoked by the administration of George Bush Sr. in 1992 when it decided to allow 150 F-16 fighter planes to be sold to Taiwan, allegedly to make up for a Chinese purchase of Su-27s from Russia.

To Beijing this shows the United States, while technically keeping to the word of the three communiques, does not mind violating their spirit, analysts said.

"China is obviously being disappointed," said Lingnan College's Bridges. "But I suppose the Chinese leadership will think that's probably the way the Americans operate."

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