China has chosen to escalate its relations with Japan and the Philippines: in response to an agreement between the two countries on the delimitation of their maritime boundaries, which touches on zones east of Taiwan that Beijing considers its own, the PRC has dispatched several patrol vessels to the area to reinforce its Coast Guard ships. In Beijing, the deployment is being described as a “special operation” intended to assert the country’s claims over the contested maritime areas.
On June 6, China sent its flotilla into the waters east of Taiwan. Vessels from the Chinese Ministry of Transport will patrol the area jointly with the Coast Guard ships that have been on site since the start of the week, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.
As reported by the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, the deployment is a response to the territorial dispute with Japan and the Philippines, which have become a “source of problems” and a “threat to peace in the Asia-Pacific region.” In late May, the two countries announced the opening of official negotiations to delimit the maritime boundaries of their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and continental shelves, which may overlap with those of Taiwan. Beijing immediately called the negotiations “illegal and invalid.”
The flotilla consists of four large vessels. It is led by the Haixun 09, the country’s first 10,000-tonne maritime patrol ship, tracked by the Marine Equipment & Government Vessel Information service. It is accompanied by the hydrographic survey ship Haixun 08 (7,500 tonnes), as well as the ocean rescue vessel Haixun 06 and the rescue ship Donghaijiu 113, both with a displacement of 5,000 tonnes. They reinforce the Coast Guard ships, which had announced as early as June 1 that they would begin patrolling the waters east of Taiwan.
Officially, Beijing describes the deployment as a routine law-enforcement measure. The state agency Xinhua called the patrols a “necessary measure” in response to the “unilateral” announcement by Japan and the Philippines of negotiations over their maritime boundary, which “seriously violates” China’s sovereignty and maritime rights. According to the agency’s wording, the operation aims to “fully exercise the country’s administrative jurisdiction in the area of maritime law enforcement” and to strengthen its capacity to patrol the open sea and monitor vessel traffic in key waters.
Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have been deteriorating since the autumn. The turning point came in November with a statement by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that an attack on Taiwan could prompt military intervention by Tokyo. Since then, the rhetoric on both sides has steadily hardened.
In parallel, the conflict between Beijing and Manila is intensifying. The long-running territorial dispute in the South China Sea has already led to frequent clashes between the two countries’ coast guards. In May, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos stated that Manila would intervene in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.
Japan and the Philippines, both U.S. allies, have been drawing noticeably closer on security matters. During Marcos’s recent visit to Japan, the two sides agreed to open negotiations on the exchange of military intelligence and to accelerate the transfer to the Philippines of six second-hand destroyers. In April and May, during the annual U.S.-Philippine Balikatan military exercises, Japanese troops set foot on Philippine soil for the first time since the occupation of the Philippines during World War II.
In Beijing, this rapprochement is perceived as a direct threat. Both countries are part of the first island chain that blocks China’s access to the Pacific Ocean and could, in the event of a conflict over Taiwan, pose serious problems for it. A commentary in the People’s Daily asserts that Tokyo and Manila are stoking a Cold War–style “bloc confrontation.” The article was published under the pseudonym Zhong Sheng — a homonym of the expression “the Voice of China,” traditionally used to set out Beijing’s official positions on foreign policy.
