Eight Japan Coast Guard ships rode out the storm in the Taiwan Strait under Taiwanese monitoring, and Taipei says five Chinese vessels followed them in an effort to assert jurisdiction over waters that Beijing considers its own.
TAIPEI — When Typhoon Champi bore down on the southern Ryukyu Islands this week, eight Japan Coast Guard patrol ships based in Okinawa did what their crews have done before: they headed west into the Taiwan Strait to wait out the weather. What happened next has turned a routine act of seamanship into another test of who controls one of the world’s busiest waterways.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration said on Friday that the Japanese ships entered the strait at about 6 a.m. Thursday, moved along the median line and stopped in waters southwest of Qimei, an island in the Penghu archipelago, staying outside Taiwan’s 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone, Focus Taiwan reported. Five China Coast Guard ships followed them, the Taiwanese agency said.
“Japan was seeking shelter in Taiwan from the typhoon while respecting the Coast Guard Administration’s law enforcement procedures,” the agency said in a statement. “We should assist in the spirit of humanity and mutual support, and call on China not to exploit the typhoon to create the false impression that it has jurisdiction or that the Taiwan Strait constitutes internal waters.”
The ships involved
According to the Taiwanese coast guard, the Japanese group included the large patrol vessels Reimei, Yashima and Ryukyu, along with the Taketomi, Kabira, Matsushima, Irabu and Osumi. The Chinese ships it identified were the Baita, the Xiushan, a third 3,000-ton cutter and two 5,000-ton Daishan-class ships.
Hsieh Ching-chin, a deputy director general of the Taiwanese agency, said the route was a matter of geography. “For JCG ships stationed in Okinawa Prefecture, going to the Taiwan Strait is the best route for sheltering from typhoons,” he said, according to Focus Taiwan.
The Taipei Times reported on Saturday that the Coast Guard Administration cited the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in its statement and accused the Chinese coast guard of having “exploited a natural disaster to unlawfully assert control,” part of what Taipei describes as a campaign to treat the strait as a Chinese inland sea. Taiwan News also reported the encounter. The storm left one person dead and 94 injured in Taiwan, Taiwan News reported.
It was not the first such episode. In August, during an earlier typhoon, a Chinese patrol ship followed the Japanese patrol vessel Urado about 35 nautical miles from Penghu, the defense news site TaiwanDefence reported, citing Taiwanese officials.
Beijing’s position
China’s Foreign Ministry and its Taiwan Affairs Office had not commented on the episode as of Friday, Focus Taiwan reported. Beijing has stated its legal view in the past. In June 2022, the ministry’s spokesman, Wang Wenbin, said that China “has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait,” rejected descriptions of the strait as “international waters,” and said China also respects the lawful rights of other countries in the relevant waters. The United States, Japan and Taiwan regard the strait as an international waterway where ships may pass freely.
The episode came as Taiwan’s coast guard separately said China was combining militia vessels with coast guard ships to expand “battlefield preparation” around Taiwan and into the western Pacific, Reuters reported. China has repeatedly said such operations off Taiwan’s east coast are “legitimate and lawful” because they are in Chinese waters, a position Taipei rejects. Analysts describe such activity as gray-zone pressure: actions short of armed conflict that, repeated often enough, can establish a pattern of control.
Shadowing ships that are merely sheltering from a storm fits that description, in Taipei’s telling. Escorting or trailing foreign government vessels lets Beijing present itself as the authority in the strait without any confrontation, and each instance becomes a precedent. Japan, for its part, appears to have treated the strait as open water for safe harbor, as mariners have for generations.
Why it registers in the Bay Area
The question of whether the Taiwan Strait is international water is not abstract for Northern California. The U.S. Coast Guard’s Pacific Area command is headquartered on Coast Guard Island in Alameda, and Alameda-based national security cutters have sailed through the strait to assert the same navigational rights Taipei is defending. The Bertholf made the transit with a Navy destroyer in March 2019, USNI News reported; the Munro followed in 2021, and the Stratton made the passage in June 2023, Times of San Diego reported.
The strait is also the shipping lane for much of the semiconductor supply chain on which Silicon Valley companies depend, and the export controls on both sides of it have been tightening, as The Inquirer reported last week. Any shift in who patrols, inspects or claims authority over the waterway would ripple into the Port of Oakland’s trans-Pacific trade and the Bay Area’s technology economy.
The Inquirer asked the consulates general of China and Japan in San Francisco for comment; neither had responded by publication time. Emails to Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco could not be delivered.
For now, the dispute is over a few days of shelter during a storm. But each side is building a record. Taiwan says it monitored the Japanese ships under its law enforcement procedures, and China’s coast guard followed them. Which description of the strait becomes accepted will matter long after Typhoon Champi has passed.
Nasrin Haidari covers foreign affairs and geopolitics, including diplomacy, trade disputes and conflicts, and their ties to California and the Pacific. More from Nasrin Haidari
