Taiwanese ships – China launched a 3-day special joint patrol for an inspection operation through its Fujian maritime safety administration in the Northern and Central portions of the Taiwanese strait. The operation includes the Chinese inspection teams boarding Taiwanese ships to inspect.
The operation comes at a volatile time in the region. Recently, the Ex-Taiwanese President Ma Ying Jeou’s office said that he had made plans to go to the mainland this month. As a senior member and former chairman of the KMT, the current biggest opposition party in Taiwan, the move was highly controversial.
To add to that, American House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted the current Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in the U.S. this Wednesday. This was the first such instance,, with Kevin McCarthy becoming the senior U.S. government official to meet a leader from Taiwan on American soil in decades.
The safety authority for maritime affairs in the southeastern part of China said that the inspection operation had on-site applications directly on cargo and construction vessels on either side of the Taiwan Strait. They conveyed that this is necessary to ‘ensure the safety’ of the vessels as well as the safety of the ‘key projects on water’.
Taiwanese Ships :-
Taiwan’s reply on the other hand came through its Transport Ministry’s Maritime and Ports Bureau, which in a late Wednesday statement said that it had lodged a protest with the Chinese administration on the operation.
They also mentioned that they had instructed the relevant shipping operators that if they did encounter this inspection patrol with requests to board from China, they should deny them and quickly notify the Taiwanese coast guard for support.
The region covered within the operation included the ‘three small links’ passenger route as well as the Taiwan Strait vessel customary route and other areas with frequent sand mining operations that are illegal.
The inspection patrol which is a special joint operation between the East China Sea Navigation Support Center and the East China Sea Rescue Bureau is going to continue to carry out inspections over the designated area in the Central and Northern parts of the Taiwanese waters of the next few days.
This move can further destabilize the region that is already visibly sliding towards a conflict. The threshold of this particular incident is quite high, but it is a blatant showcase of the shrinking and worsening relations between the Taiwanese island and mainland of China. The Chinese blame the US for interfering with what is China’s domestic affairs, as China considers Taiwan a part of its sovereignty and a province. The recent meetings between the current Taiwanese president and the US House speaker only strengthen this belief.Â
The US has largely maintained a level of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, refusing to outright support or deny support to Taiwan in case of a full-scale takeover of the Island from the Mainland.
