More than 100 new coast guard boats will be built in the next decade, Tsai said in December, vowing to enforce a crackdown with “no mercy” on Chinese dredging in Taiwan waters. Last year, President Tsai Ing-wen commissioned into service the first of a new class of coast guard vessel, based on the design of an “aircraft-carrier killer,” a missile boat for the navy. Taiwan is in the process of beefing up its coast guard, partly in response to the dredging threat. That day, he said, his team expelled seven Chinese vessels that breached Matsu waters.Ī coast guard vessel sprays a Chinese sand dredger with a water cannon after it entered Matsu’s waters in late October last year. 25, when he and his colleagues encountered an armada of roughly 100 Chinese boats. Lin, the coast guard commander, recalls a similar scene playing out on the morning of Oct. China doesn’t officially recognize any claims of sovereignty by Taiwan.Īt one point last year, more than 200 Chinese sand-dredging and transport boats were spotted operating south of Nangan, the main Matsu islet, three Taiwanese officials told Reuters. Taiwan says those waters extend six kilometers out from the coastline here. On some days, government officials said, the coast guard has faced hundreds of Chinese vessels, ranging in size from 1,000 to 3,000 tons, in and around the island’s waters. The island has a total of just nine coast guard ships, ranging from 10 to 100 tons. Matsu is just nine kilometers from the Chinese coastline at the closest point. Their isolation, and their much-reduced Taiwanese military presence since the end of the Cold War, would make them highly vulnerable to a Chinese attack. The Matsu, Kinmen and Pratas island groups lie several hundred kilometers from mainland Taiwan. They are one of a handful of island groups close to China’s coast that Taiwan has governed since 1949, when the defeated Republic of China government, under Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war. The Matsu Islands are almost an hour by plane from Taipei. If he succeeds - by gray-zone tactics or outright war - it would dramatically undermine America’s decades of strategic dominance in the Asia-Pacific region and propel China toward preeminence in the area. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense did not respond to questions.Ĭhinese President Xi Jinping has not ruled out the use of force to subdue Taiwan. The council said the government had recently increased penalties for illegal dredging in its waters. | Photo by Ann Wang/REUTERSĪsked about China’s gray-zone actions, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which oversees policy toward China, said the Chinese Communist Party was engaging in “harassment” with the aim of putting pressure on Taiwan. “They usually leave after we drive them away, but they come back again after we go away,” he said, referring to the Chinese sand dredgers. The office also said Taiwan is “an inseparable part of China.” Taiwanese authorities, it alleged, are using their claims of control over the waters near the islands to “detain mainland boats and even resorting to dangerous and violent means in their treatment of mainland crews.”Ĭommander Lin Chie-ming aboard his coast guard vessel in late January. The office did say it has taken steps to stop illegal sand-dredging, without elaborating. China’s sand dredging, said one Taiwanese security official investigating the matter, is “part of their psychological warfare against Taiwan, similar to what they are doing in Taiwan’s southwestern airspace,” where the Chinese jets are intruding.Ĭhina’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement to Reuters that Taiwan’s claims that Beijing is allowing sand-dredging boats to engage in “illegal operations” near Matsu and the median line are baseless. Taiwanese military officials and Western analysts say China’s gray-zone tactics are meant to drain the resources and erode the will of the island’s armed forces - and make such harassment so routine that the world grows inured to it. Taiwan has been scrambling military aircraft on an almost daily basis to head off the threat, placing an onerous burden on its air force. The most dramatic: In recent months, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, has been dispatching warplanes in menacing forays toward the island. China, which claims democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, has been using other irregular tactics to wear down the island of 23 million. Sand is just part of the gray-zone campaign. “You dredge for sand on the one hand, but if you can also put pressure on Taiwan, then that’s great, too.” The dredging is a “gray-zone strategy with Chinese characteristics,” said Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow at Taiwan’s top military think tank, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. In Matsu, there were also many Chinese vessels that sailed close to Taiwanese waters without actually entering, forcing the coast guard to be on constant alert.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |