Taiwan’s Coast Guard said China sent two maritime law-enforcement ships to operate east of the island on Saturday, part of a pattern Taipei treats as rehearsal for blockade pressure, and responded by deploying its own vessels to monitor the activity.
Chinese state media aired video of one ship broadcasting a radio message that it was conducting law enforcement and offering assistance, while showing an unidentified fishing trawler nearby. The Taiwan Coast Guard said those radio warnings harass shipping, expand paramilitary power beyond recognized legal limits, and undermine regional stability.
Why the east coast matters
Unlike the heavily surveilled Taiwan Strait, the Pacific side off Hualien and Taitung is where planners assume wartime resupply would flow if the west were contested. Beijing has increased coast guard presence there since mid-2025, blending navy drills with grey-zone tools that stop short of open fire but still signal control over sea lanes Taiwan considers vital.
Taipei asserts full sovereign rights and jurisdiction over its exclusive economic zone east of the island. Saturday’s statement repeated that China “has absolutely no jurisdiction” over those waters and called the broadcast campaign a “clear expansion of power” that violates international law.
Parallel pressure near Pratas
In a separate bulletin, the Taiwan Coast Guard said another Chinese coast guard ship approached the Taiwan-held Pratas Islands, which sit far south of the main island toward the South China Sea. No permanent civilians live on Pratas, but security analysts warn the atoll’s distance from Taiwan proper makes it an early target in any coercive campaign.
Officials in Taipei have linked coast guard incursions to broader People’s Liberation Army air and naval activity, including large aircraft sorties tracked by the defense ministry. The coast guard frames its job as documenting each incident for allies who rely on open shipping routes through the first island chain.
What happens next
Taiwan did not announce new weapons deployments Saturday, but the Coast Guard said it would keep assets on station as long as Chinese ships remained in the area. Washington, Tokyo and Seoul reaffirmed Taiwan Strait stability at G20-side meetings in Atlanta on Friday, language Taipei’s foreign ministry welcomed even though those statements do not automatically translate into escorts east of Hualien.
Commercial captains operating in the Pacific fishery will watch whether Saturday’s radio warnings become routine hailings that force course changes. For now, the incident adds another logged entry in a grey-zone ledger where law-enforcement branding, not declared war, is how both sides test who blinks when a trawler’s bridge radio crackles with an offer of “help” from a paramilitary ship on the horizon.