The massive, eight-day exercises started Wednesday, Aug. 18 and will continue through this Thursday.

On Saturday, paratroopers landed on China's Shandong peninsula as part of the deployment of almost 10,000 troops from both countries. The exercises, as described by Russia's Itar-Tass news agency, sounded more like preparations for D-Day rather than any reactive moves against a handful of terrorists. Some of the paratroops practiced reaching an "assault position and the launching of an attack on enemy positions," the news agency said.

China's official Xinhua news agency defended the reassuring counter-terrorism cover story for the exercises by saying they were meant to practice "dealing with crises and organizing coordinated actions in the backdrop of the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism."

But the use of the term "separatism" suggested another possible purpose, at least in Chinese eyes. For if China were ever to consider projecting its overwhelming military power against the offshore island of Taiwan, whose current President Chen Shui-bian has repeatedly infuriated Beijing with his moves towards full de jure legal independence, then they would have to practice exactly the kind of maneuvers they are undertaking in the exercise.

And if Russian forces at some point in the future were ever to be deployed in military - and, therefore, also political - support of any Chinese military operation to deter any U.S. intervention in defense of Taiwan, then the two armed forces would have to have had experience in full-scale operational cooperation, just as they are doing this week in the Shandong exercises.

It is also striking that the exercises involve the practice of combined operations with elements from the navies and air forces, as well as the armies, of both countries being involved. In all, no less than 9,000 Chinese troops and 1,800 Russian ones are involved in the exercises, the first ever between the two nations.

Even when China and the Soviet Union were communist ideological allies against the United States at the height of the Cold War from 1949 to 1958, and through the Korean War of 1950-53, they never carried out any joint military activities on anything close to this scale.

China and Russia have insisted that the exercise is not directed against any specific third country. But it is hard not to think that the United States and its closest Asian ally Japan, were not in the planners' minds.

After all, the exercises also involves practicing the deployment of submarines and long-range bombers to strike back the fleet of any other power, and only the United States and Japan have any forces that could qualify as targets or potential foes off Northeast Asia.

The exercises will also be "a good opportunity for Russia, the largest arms supplier to the People's Republic, to showcase new weapon systems," wrote Sergei Blagov of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation in Eurasia Daily Monitor last week.

"(T)he war game is seen as a manifestation of the Moscow-Beijing bilateral 'strategic partnership.' But at the same time, Russia's simultaneous northern war game appears intended as a demonstration of Moscow's strategic military might," Blagov wrote.

Blagov also noted that the war games involved Russia's Ilyushin Il-76 transport planes with paratroopers, Tupolev Tu-95MS bombers firing cruise missiles at targets in the sea, and Sukhoi Su-27SM fighter jets simulating coverage of ground forces.

"Ships from the Pacific Fleet sailed to China's coasts, while troops from the Pskov 76th Airborne Division have also moved to exercise zone," he wrote. Meanwhile, "warships from the Russian Pacific Fleet, including a BDK-11 landing vessel, the Marshal Shaposhnikov anti-submarine vessel, and a Burny destroyer will take part in the joint exercises."

Again, this all seems somewhat in the nature of overkill if any kind of al-Qaida terrorist attack was the only thing that was being prepared against.

Even in Russia, Blagov noted, some media outlets have questioned the motives behind the war game.

The Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta reported Aug. 15 that the drill's scenario involved anti-submarine and anti-aircraft operations, as well as cruise missile launches. But as international terrorists had yet to acquire any naval or air forces, the paper somewhat dryly noted that the relevance of the drill's scenario remained open to debate.

Analyst Ariel Cohen of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, linked the timing of the exercises to the much more diplomatically outspoken stand against U.S. influence in Central Asia that Russia and China adopted this summer.

During the July 6 Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, China and Russia issued a demand that the United States provide a timetable for withdrawal of its troops and bases from the region. On July 31, Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov duly notified Washington that the United States had to leave the Karshi-Khanabad (K-2) air base.

"The anti-American axis is beginning to work," Cohen said. "Sino-Russian rapprochement is keeping Central Asian dictators in power."

Russian analysts have been openly saying much the same thing: "The exercises are the logical continuation of the first signs of cooperation between Russia and China in the struggle against 'orange revolutions,' separatism and the dominant influence of the United States in the Euro-Asiatic sphere," the newspaper web site Gazeta.ru announced Thursday.

U.S. leaders and analysts reacted with complacency back in July when the Shanghai group came out with its calls to roll back U.S. influence in Central Asia. The statements were shrugged off as empty rhetoric with no substance behind them.

But less than two months later the Shandong exercises are already showing that those sentiments are backed up with a lot of military muscle indeed.

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