In a strongly worded ministry of defense statement, China protested against a US move to upgrade Taiwan's F-16 fighter jets in a 5.3 billion dollar deal. "The Chinese military expresses great indignation and strong condemnation," it says.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun urged Washington to "immediately cancel the wrong decision" and summoned US Ambassador Gary Locke in Beijing to protest against the deal.

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province to be reunified with the mainland eventually, and by force if necessary.

It opposes US arms sales to Taiwan on the grounds they could sabotage plans for reunification. Washington has said Beijing and Taipei should determine their future peacefully. The US is also obliged by law to help Taiwan defend itself.

More bark than bite

Last year, Chinese outrage over an earlier US arms offer to Taiwan caused a great deal of tension between the two countries, adding to a series of disputes.

However, observers said on Thursday that the deal would not be as damaging to Sino-US relations as a decision to sell new fighters to the island would have been.

"They are going to react, get angry, and the military may take measures to better counter these retrofitted F-16s," Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political science professor at Hong Kong Baptist University told AFP. "But they will not break military ties with the United States like they did before."

Sun Zhe, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing told Reuters that the Chinese authorities were probably still weighing up how to punish the US for the deal and that domestic opinion would also play a role.

"When it comes to arms sales to Taiwan, the Chinese public is strongly against and the central government will have to take into account public opinion or risk being criticized as too weak," he said.

Author: Anne Thomas (AP, AFP, Reuters)
Editor: Grahame Lucas