Taiwan accuses China of harassing shipping with east coast patrol and sending ship near Pratas Islands
Taiwan's Coast Guard said China's latest patrol off the island's east coast harassed shipping and tried to exert a fictional jurisdiction, and that Beijing also sent a coast guard ship close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.
Taiwan has accused China of harassing shipping with its latest coast guard patrol off the island's east coast, in a sharp response that raises tensions around waters Beijing claims but Taipei says it has no right to police. Taiwan's Coast Guard said it had sent its own ships to keep watch on the Chinese vessels and rejected Beijing's attempt to assert jurisdiction over the area.
The response came late on Saturday, after China announced its latest east coast patrol. Taiwan's Coast Guard said two Chinese ships were involved in the patrol and that it had dispatched its own forces to monitor them. Chinese state media showed video of one of its ships broadcasting a radio message saying it was carrying out law enforcement and offering help should any be needed.
In its statement, Taiwan's Coast Guard said China's 'attempts to harass ships at sea through radio communications are a clear expansion of power that violate international law, undermine regional peace and stability, and deviate from reality'. The wording is unusually blunt, and it frames the patrol not as routine law enforcement but as an attempt to extend Chinese authority over waters off Taiwan's eastern shore.
China regards Taiwan as its own territory and has stepped up activity off the island's east coast since June, with regular coast guard patrols that Taipei has protested. Beijing does not recognise any claim of sovereignty by Taiwan, and its coast guard has increasingly presented its patrols as law enforcement in waters it claims, a practice Taiwan says is designed to normalise a Chinese presence around the island.
Separately, Taiwan's Coast Guard said China on Saturday also sent another coast guard ship close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands, a small archipelago strategically located at the top of the South China Sea. Taiwan said it had so far this year 'expelled' Chinese coast guard vessels from Pratas waters thirteen times, a figure that points to a pattern of repeated incursions rather than an isolated incident.
The Pratas Islands, known in Chinese as Dongsha, sit at a sensitive junction between the South China Sea and the waters around Taiwan, and control of the surrounding seas matters for shipping routes and for military access. A sustained Chinese coast guard presence there would add to the pressure Taiwan already faces from patrols around its main island and its outlying islets.
The episode comes at a time of heightened friction across the region, with the United States and its allies watching Chinese coast guard activity around Taiwan closely and with Beijing continuing to assert its claims in the South China Sea. Taiwan's decision to publicise both the east coast patrol and the Pratas incident together suggests Taipei wants the pattern, not just a single patrol, to be noticed.
For shipping, the immediate question is practical: whether Chinese radio messages to merchant vessels off Taiwan's east coast become more frequent or more assertive, and how commercial operators respond. Taiwan's warning that the messages amount to harassment is aimed at drawing international attention to that risk, and at establishing a public record of each incident.
What happens next will depend on whether China repeats the patrols in the coming days and whether Taiwan's monitoring vessels and its public statements harden into a more formal protest. Neither side has signalled a change of course, and the east coast patrols that began in June show no sign of stopping, which means further confrontations at sea are likely.
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