BEIJING - China has dispatched heavily armed troops to the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, to guard against any terrorist attack, a newspaper said yesterday.

The forces had begun patrolling waters near the $25 billion project in central Hubei province, built also to tame the flood-prone Yangtze River, the online edition of Huaxia, or China Times, said.

The dam was first proposed decades ago, but construction was delayed because late Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong wanted to ensure the People's Liberation Army (PLA) could defend it against any attack by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops.

Soldiers manning the dam had been equipped with armed helicopters, airships, armoured vehicles and robots to defuse bombs, the newspaper said.

"The move symbolises the completion of the deployment of armed, anti-terror troops at big bridges, dams and hydropower plants along large rivers," the paper said.

China has trained its anti-terror forces with "powerful style, flexible command and specific strengths", it said.

In June, the official China Youth Daily quoted PLA Lieutenant-General Liu Yuan, a son of late president Liu Shaoqi, as saying China would be "seriously on guard against threats from Taiwan independence terrorists".

His comments came in response to the U.S. Pentagon's annual report to Congress on China's military power, which said unnamed proponents of strikes against China "apparently hope" that merely establishing places like the Three Gorges Dam as targets would deter Chinese military coercion.

China has considered Taiwan a breakaway province that must be returned to the fold, by force if necessary, since their split at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 when the Nationalists fled to the island.

Construction of the dam finally began in 1993 and engineers blocked the Yangtze at the Three Gorges Dam in June last year, a point of national pride in a country desperate for electricity but which critics fear will become an environmental disaster.

China staged anti-terror manoeuvres in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on Sunday, citing a rise in global terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.