The United States said it was “closely monitoring Beijing’s actions” after China’s coast guard intercepted a tourist boat on Monday near one of Taiwan’s front-line islands.
Taiwan’s coast guard said in a statement on Tuesday that the Taiwanese vessel, carrying 11 crew and 23 tourists, was boarded by six China Coast Guard officers, who reviewed their travel documents for half an hour. The passengers later told local media they feared for their lives.
The incident happened a day after the Chinese coast guard said it would step up maritime law enforcement around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen islands in response to the recent deaths of two Chinese fishermen, whose speedboat—carrying four—capsized while being pursued by Taiwanese authorities for allegedly trespassing in restricted waters.
Kinmen, which sits just six miles from the Chinese city of Xiamen, came under intense shelling in the Cold War during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958. The archipelago is today a popular tourist destination, but most of its islets remain heavily fortified.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Kuan Bi-ling, who heads the Ocean Affairs Council that oversees Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration, said on Tuesday in Taipei that the incident near Kinmen had caused unnecessary “public panic.”
Chinese and Taiwanese tourist boats regularly cross into each other’s waters, but an inspection was a departure from the norm, she suggested.
Observers in Taiwan say Beijing means to use the Chinese coast guard as another tool to pressure the government in Taipei, including by rejecting the existence of “prohibited” or “restricted” waters around Kinmen, maritime boundaries that had been respected by both sides for over 30 years.
“We continue to urge restraint and no unilateral change to the status quo, which has preserved peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and throughout the region for decades,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Newsweek.
“We urge the PRC to engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan to reduce the risk of miscalculation,” the official said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing could not be reached for comment.
Coast guard authorities in Kinmen said they expelled a Chinese government boat that had spent an hour inside Taiwanese territorial waters on Tuesday.
At least one other China Coast Guard ship came within 1.5 nautical miles of Kinmen’s main island later the same day, according to vessel-tracking data shared to X (formerly Twitter) by Ray Powell, director of the Stanford University-affiliated SeaLight project.
Repeated intrusions into Taiwanese territorial waters, albeit not around Taiwan proper, would be unprecedented in recent decades and Taipei is conscious that such an incident could spiral into a full-blown confrontation.
Outside the Taiwanese legislature on Tuesday, Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s defense minister, said the island’s armed forces would not “actively intervene” so as to “avoid war.”
“If we intervene, it will escalate the conflict, and that isn’t what we want to see,” said Chiu, who hoped the problem could be resolved peacefully.
AFP via Getty Images/TED ALJIBE
Lii Wen, director of international affairs for Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party, said on X on Tuesday that the speedboat incident was “regrettable” but should not be politicized.
“China should view this unfortunate incident as an issue of law enforcement that the two sides can work on together, in a responsible way. Political interpretations or reactions should be avoided,” Lii wrote.
“China’s attempts to blur the lines of Taiwan’s restricted waters is worrisome, as this could lead to the expansion of Chinese law enforcement. We have seen this trend in China’s incursions past the median line of the Taiwan Strait, and now in the waters around Kinmen,” Lii said.
“Such actions risk unintentional clashes and an unnecessary escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait,” he said.
China claims Taiwan and its outlying islands as part of its territory, all to be brought under Communist Party rule. Taipei has long rejected Beijing’s sovereignty claims.
Despite the long-running political tensions, lower-level practical cooperation is possible.
On Monday, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said officials from the Quanzhou Red Cross would accompany family members of the fishermen who died in the speedboat incident, and the two surviving fishermen, to Kinmen in order to bring them home.
Taiwan’s coast guard on Tuesday said it had assisted in the group’s arrival and would facilitate their visit until their return to China.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.