TAIPEI — The crew of the Taiwanese fishing boat Wan Fa Cheng 11 was working southwest of Kaohsiung on Sunday when a Chinese research ship and a steel-hulled Chinese fishing boat began interfering with their operations. The coast guard ship Pingtung steamed to the scene to protect them, Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration said, and it was only one of four confrontations the agency says China staged at the same time.
The others were strung along the island’s coastline. The research ship Tansuo-3 entered restricted waters east of Hualien, where a patrol boat from the Taitung unit broadcast orders to leave. Beidiao 996, another research ship, crossed into restricted waters southwest of Eluanbi after midnight and turned away only after the Hengchun unit’s patrol boat warned it 12 times. Beijing rotated its coast guard formation east of Taiwan in July, so Chinese ships in those waters are not new.
The fourth front was Dongsha, the atoll also known as Pratas, where China Coast Guard vessels 3301 and 3303 circled the island until the coast guard ships Qijin and Taichung shadowed them out. All of them were beyond the restricted waters by about noon, the agency said. Its tally for the day is 12 coast guard, research and other ships plus four fishing boats, 16 in all, which it calls an abnormal increase and a hybrid-warfare operation.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration said the aim was to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait unilaterally, through what it calls “fake law enforcement, real expansion.” The 16 is the agency’s own count, and the statement does not say how it was reached. It singles out only six vessels by name or hull number: the two cutters, three research ships and one fishing boat, if the steel-hulled boat off Kaohsiung is among its four. That leaves ten described only as a number.
Dongsha is familiar ground. In its October 16 release, the agency said it had expelled China Coast Guard ships from the atoll 11 times this year, 14 ship-passages in all, after 3301 and 3303 entered restricted waters that Friday afternoon. The same two hull numbers were back on Sunday. If Sunday counts, the tally becomes 12 episodes and 16 passages, though the agency has not said so.
A year ago Taipei’s defence report said Beijing was rehearsing a blockade, and the hybrid-warfare label places Sunday on that spectrum, though the release offers no evidence of intent. No Chinese response to Sunday’s statement had surfaced when this was written, and TEH could not see the Chinese side of the encounters, only Taipei’s account of them.
What the release does not say is where the other ten vessels were, or what the research ships were surveying.
