China has signaled its intention to maintain a new coast guard patrol east of Taiwan, analysts say, as Beijing mounts pressure on the self-ruled island it claims as part of its territory.
Tensions over Western Pacific waters near Taiwan rose after the Chinese coast guard and other ships launched their “first law enforcement operation” in the area in June.
During the operation, China’s Coast Guard for the first time radioed cargo ships passing Taiwan for information about their crew and destination.
Chinese state media said the operation was in response to talks between Japan and the Philippines to establish a boundary in those waters.
But Taipei called it “expansionism in disguise” and some Western governments expressed concern about the “novel” activity.
China Coast Guard vessels patrolling the waters have since been replaced by a second group that will “continue law enforcement patrols,” China Coast Guard spokesman Jiang Lue said on Saturday.
“China is basically announcing a new normal,” Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, which monitors China’s maritime activities, told AFP.
China deploys warplanes and naval vessels around Taiwan almost daily, and Chinese coast guard vessels regularly enter waters near Taiwan’s outer islands, including those outside China.
Until June, however, China’s coast guard presence in waters east of Taiwan had been limited to “blockade-style military exercises”, William Yang, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, told AFP.
The patrols were “beyond political signaling,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Beijing appears to be claiming sweeping law enforcement rights in its claimed exclusive economic zone that go far beyond what is allowed under international law,” Poling told AFP.
Su Tzu-yun, a military expert at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said China’s patrols were creating “new operational norms”.
“By conducting radio verification procedures for the passage of commercial vessels, China is effectively testing the mechanisms required for a future blockade or quarantine,” he said.
“The Sashimi Strategy”
For years, China has steadily expanded its military and coast guard activities in the waters around Taiwan and the region.
Director-General of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau Tsai Ming-yen said on Monday that four Chinese formations, including warships, were operating in the Western Pacific, noting an “increasing trend” in mobilization during the peak season of China’s naval exercises.
“We have tracked a record high of over 110 #PLAN & #CCG vessels” along the first island chain, National Security Council Chief Joseph Wu said at X on Saturday.
Taiwan has responded to China’s new coast guard patrol by deploying two of its own coast guard vessels to monitor the two Chinese vessels.
Chinese patrols have generally operated between 74-124 nautical miles (137-230 kilometers) off Taiwan’s coast, which Taiwanese officials say is within the island’s exclusive economic zone.
During last month’s operation, Taiwan first heard of China’s Coast Guard contacting three passing cargo ships for information about their crew numbers and port of destination.
One of the cargo ships – a Singapore-flagged container ship – complied with China’s demands, a senior coastguard official told AFP.
Taiwan’s Vice Minister of Ocean Affairs Sung Chen-en said on Wednesday that China had tried to “create a model where the shipping community feels the need to report to them” but failed.
Sung said China must be stopped “at an early stage” to ensure it “never succeeds”.
“We will make sure that (the patrols) are not permanent because they are not supposed to be here,” Sung told AFP.
Chinese coast guard ships regularly patrol around the disputed Senkaku Islandsknown as the Diaoyu in Chinese, which are administered by Tokyo but also claimed by Beijing, and the disputed South China Sea, which China claims almost entirely.
“They seem to want people to understand that this is what they’re doing here,” Powell said of the patrols outside Taiwan, describing them as “a step up the quarantine ladder.”
“It’s a very unworthy signal that they intend to stay there for the long term.”
Su said it fits with China’s “methodical” approach to expanding patrols in the region as part of a “sashimi strategy”.
China is “making extremely thin, almost invisible pieces that individually seem insignificant but collectively produce fundamental changes in the strategic status quo,” he said.
