BEIJING -- China, embroiled for years in an elaborate and increasingly tense chess game with Taiwan, is expected to make another aggressive move when the National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp parliament, begins its annual legislative session here this weekend.
he congress is slated to pass an antisecession law aimed at reining in Taiwan's recent moves toward declaring independence from mainland China, which considers the island a renegade province.
The United States has said it is discouraging China from passing the law, but action on it at the congress is almost certain.
''The Taiwan issue has become very troublesome for China -- so this is our response," said Jin Linbo, director of Asian Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. ''I don't know why people are worried. This is not a military response but a legal one. All we are doing is codifying the one-China policy, which even the US accepts, into law."
But part of that policy is China's oft-repeated warning that it will attack Taiwan if it tries to unilaterally change the status quo, under which the island enjoys de facto independence but remains a de jure part of China.
''Enshrining that threat in law is China's way of scaring the Taiwanese people into surrendering their hopes for independence," said Philip Yang, associate professor of political science at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. ''For some time now, Beijing has felt Taiwan is drifting towards independence. They think this law can stop that, [but] I think it could backfire. Already people are organizing rallies in the streets here and speaking about passing our own antireunification law."
Richard Bush, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said he's not sure if the law really matters.
''China is not a nation of laws," he said. ''How this law is written or whether or not it will pass is not going to change the way the Chinese government behaves. Ultimately it will do whatever it wants."
But Yang says China's law and any reaction from Taiwan would almost certainly set off a fresh cycle of brinkmanship between the estranged neighbors.
Over the past 50 years both sides have used every means at their disposal -- diplomatic, economic, even the threat of military action -- to try to stymie each other. The problems peaked in 1996 when China fired missiles into the Taiwan Straits and the United States sent an aircraft carrier into the area.
The latest round of tensions between the two erupted last March when Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, declared his intention to revise Taiwan's constitution in 2006 -- something Beijing said would be akin to a declaration of independence.
''Suddenly Beijing felt itself to be losing control," said Alan Wachman, associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. ''The antisecession law was conceived then as a response to the anxiety China was feeling about Chen . . . as a measure to show firmness and resolve."
Significantly, the situation in Taiwan began to change soon after Beijing took up planning the law.
Chen was warned about getting too belligerent with Beijing by the United States, which under the Taiwan Relations Act, is legally bound to side with the island in the event of a war. The international furor Chen's China-baiting created also gutted his and his party's image at home, and the more China-friendly opposition Kuomintang Party made a clean sweep of Taiwan's parliamentary election last December.
As a result, the latest comments made by a chastised Chen on cross-straits relations were conciliatory, and he even talked about Taiwan's eventual reunification with China.
But in Beijing, the die was cast.
''Things had gone so far [with the antisecession bill] that it wasn't politically feasible to withdraw it," Wachman said. ''Now Beijing risks stirring up a benign situation, painting itself further into that awkward corner of promising it will fight a war it really doesn't want to."
Despite the verbal, and occasionally very real, missiles China hurls Taiwan's way, analysts say Beijing desperately wants to avoid a conflict, particularly one that that could pitch it against the United States.
Part of the reason, they say, is that while Beijing feels it can control a diplomatic spat, it knows no one can control a war.
''There's no assurance of what will happen once the sword is out of the scabbard," Wachman said. ''The Communist Party can barely control China today. Even if it were to win a war against Taiwan, how do you subordinate a nation of 23 million educated, cosmopolitan, and wealthy people who'd be united in their hatred of China?"
Another reason China does not want war is that its ''first priority is to develop," said Jin, in Beijing. ''Taiwan is a very important and emotional issue for us, but we are willing to wait for reunification."
That's what Mao Zedong told President Richard M. Nixon when the two leaders reestablished diplomatic relations in the early 1970s.
But changing political realities in China might be leading the Communist Party to move Taiwan to the center of its foreign policy.
''When Mao was in power he and others could rule China without worrying about Hong Kong or Taiwan because they had legitimacy and popular backing," said Wang Jianwei, chairman of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin. ''Today the Chinese government has a legitimacy problem because of the global failure of communism and the serious flaws in its market reforms" that have created widespread inequalities in China.
Faced with that situation, Wang said China's Communist Party is draping itself in the flag and seeking refuge in a jingoistic patriotism.
''Today nationalism is the party's only real credential," Wang said.