Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: lienyuan lee/WikiCommons/CC BY 3.0
IN AN APPARENT repeat of an incident that happened in June, a Chinese man in a rubber dinghy was detained in Linkou last week after apparently traveling from China.
The occupant of the dinghy, a 30-year-old man surnamed Wang who was severely dehydrated when he was found and immediately hospitalized, claimed to have been in substantial debt and that he hoped to start a new life in Taiwan. Identity documents found on the man seemed to confirm his identity.
This proves similar to an incident in June when a 60-year-old Chinese man surnamed Ruan was taken into custody near Tamsui. Ruan claimed to have hoped to defect to Taiwan and was found to have been a retired People’s Liberation Army captain.
Authorities later indicted Ruan on trespassing but claimed that nothing linked to the Chinese military was found about Ruan’s unusual trip to Taiwan. It was originally suspected that Ruan’s narrative could have been false, in that he could have been released from a vessel in the Taiwan Strait before traveling to Taiwan.
Specifically, it is highly unusual for any individual to make it to Taiwan by speedboat, rather than one of Taiwan’s outlying islands. As such, there were suspicions at the time that Ruan’s transit was intended to probe Taiwan’s defense, seeing as the Tamsui Estuary would be critical for Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Radar operators were apparently monitoring 30 to 57 vessels but Ruan was able to slip through at the time. Similarly, there has been scrutiny over the fact that despite the incident in June, Wang was also able to make it to Taiwan undetected.
Photo credit: Eugene_o/WikiCommons/CC BY 2.0
Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling stated that there was no error by personnel with regard to Wang making it to Taiwan, but that the incident showed that improvements were needed regarding Taiwan’s border security. In particular, one notes that with both incidents, government officials faced conflicting imperatives, in that they needed to defend the response by the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) to avoid the CGA coming off as ineffectual, while still pointing to room for improvement.
Premier Cho Jung-tai has stated that the government will investigate such incidents to determine the motives of such individuals. In this sense, even if it does transpire that such transits were aimed at probing Taiwan’s defense, it is possible that this leads to a shoring up of border security.
Despite the distance between Taiwan and China, borders are inherently porous and so limited incidents may not necessarily indicate security failures at the highest level. Even so, it is possible that such incidents would be leveraged on for propaganda purposes.
The two incidents take place during a time of increased contestation between Taiwan and China regarding outlying islands. Since an incident earlier this year that involved a Chinese fishing speed boat illegally trespassing in Kinmen territorial waters and the deaths of two fishermen after the vessel attempted to flee and collided with a Coast Guard vessel, China has stepped up incursions into waters around Kinmen.
This takes place in the same timeframe as efforts by China to influence Taiwan’s outlying islands economically, such as by lifting the current ban on group tours to Taiwan for Matsu. Even so, the number of Chinese tour groups to actually travel to Matsu has been relatively limited.
To this extent, in terms of domestic politics, the KMT calls for authority over the relegation of restricted waters to be transferred from the ROC military to the Coast Guard. It may be that the KMT hopes for such authority to be transferred to an institution it has a stronger ability to influence. This is to be seen.