Quietly, out of the public eye, the US Coast Guard has been gradually expanding its exchanges with China's agencies engaged in maritime security.
Chinese law enforcement officers ride coast guard cutters patrolling North Pacific fishing areas. Chinese and US officers scrutinize port security on each other's coasts. The Chinese take part in joint training drills.
China, along with Canada, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US attend an annual North Pacific Coast Guard Forum in Alaska.
And the coast guard has just posted a Chinese-speaking officer, Captain Barney Moreland, to the US embassy in Beijing to be a liaison with Chinese officials, including those dealing with port security. ?Most of the US$207 billion in Chinese exports to the US in the first nine months of this year were moved by ship.
Politics
All of this goes on despite often uneasy relations between the US and China.
"We put politics aside to focus on the mission," said Rear Admiral Sally Brice-O'Hara, who commands coast guard ships and sailors from Hawaii west to the shores of Asia.
The coast guard's exchanges are part of a US effort to engage China.
Military exchanges lapsed after Chinese authorities crushed a pro-democracy movement at Tienanmen Square in 1989 and a Chinese fighter plane collided with a US reconnaissance plane off Hainan in 2001.
Those exchanges have been revived by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and carried out by the commander of US forces in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon. The coast guard, which belongs to the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Defense, nonetheless coordinates its China exchanges with Fallon's Pacific Command.
Rumseld's successor, Robert Gates, indicated to the Senate Armed Services Committee in a prepared statement last week that he would continue those exchanges.
"I believe that expanded military exchanges with China can be valuable but should be based on China's willingness to reciprocate," he said.
The reasons for the exchanges are several. At the workaday level the Chinese are learning "best practices," or how things are well done, Brice-O'Hara said.
Suspicious
Strategically, the Pacific Command seeks to reassure the Chinese, who are suspicious of foreign powers, that the US is not planning to attack. Conversely, the US seeks to deter the Chinese from miscalculating and planning a war with the US.
In a related exchange, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is scheduled to lead a high-powered delegation to Beijing next week for the first meeting of the US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. ?His delegation is to include Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao (
On board
Down at deck level, the coast guard cutter Rush called at the Chinese port of Qingdao recently to pick up an official of the Fisheries Law Enforcement Commission, Tan Lizhou. He came aboard to work with the crew as they checked on whether fishing boats in the North Pacific were operating in accord with international agreements intended to conserve dwindling stocks of fish there.
"We made him part of the crew," said Captain Dana Ware, then the skipper of the ship.
He assigned Tan the rank of lieutenant commander, which made him relatively senior among the ship's 20 officers.
Tan mustered to quarters, ate with the officers in the wardroom -- where he didn't much care for American food -- and had computer connections with his home base in China.
Tan's main duty, however, was to communicate by radio with Chinese fishing vessels that Ware thought should be inspected, then to go with the boarding party to verify the vessel's registration, equipment records, and catch log.
"We let him do most of the talking," Ware said, noting that Tan's English got better as time passed so that he could explain more to his US hosts.
An e-mail to Tan asking whether his voyage on Rush had been worthwhile and served the purposes of his government went unanswered.
Security
Ashore, port security has taken high priority since the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults in New York and Washington. Having a terrorist hide a bomb somewhere in a shipment of Chinese exports to the US causes anxiety -- as does a shipment of imports into China from anywhere.
Thus, said Brice-O'Hara: "We want to see their port security standards. And the Chinese come look at our ports so that we can share best practices."
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US