Last month, a mini-crisis erupted at Kinmen (金門), the Taipei-administered offshore island once popularly known in America as “Quemoy” that inconveniently is plumb in the middle of Xiamen (廈門) harbor. Mercifully unlike previous crises, this one seems not to have been a planned provocation by the Chinese central people’s government. Nor does either side, China or Taiwan, want the matter to escalate.
History suggests that Beijing still regards Kinmen and the other Taipei-administered “offshore islands” such as Matsu (馬祖), Tung-yin (東引) and Wu-ch’iu (烏坵) as important geographic strongholds which anchor Taiwan to the motherland. As a result, Beijing is not likely to provoke any crisis on the islands which might oblige Taiwan’s government to cede their administration to China.
Taiwan newspapers depicted the first of last month’s confrontations in Quemoy’s waters (I still call Kinmen “Quemoy” for sentimental reasons) as a violent encounter. On Valentine’s Day (February 14), a rogue Xiamen-based “fishing vessel,” described by Taiwan news media as a “speed-boat,” was challenged by a smaller patrol boat manned by Taiwan Coast Guard (CGA) officers. The rogue vessel refused to obey the Taiwan Coast Guard orders to “heave to,” but rather than retreat from the Taiwan-administered waters, it sped around the Taiwan enforcement craft. Several Taiwan press reports suggested the Chinese “speed-boat” purposely collided with the Taiwan Coast Guard Administration boat “multiple times,” a report that the CGA could neither confirm nor deny because the CGA crewman manning the boat’s video recorder was holding on for dear life as his boat evaded the Chinese suspects.
For whatever reason, the Chinese fishing captain executed a high-speed turn which capsized his vessel, killing him and one other. In this case, it was reported that the China Coast Guard (CCG) itself also had unpleasant run-ins with the recently-deceased. Needless to say, whenever such confrontations at sea result in deaths, there ensues considerable finger-pointing. Regardless of who might have been at fault, if Chinese citizens, reputable or otherwise, die in such an encounter, the Chinese government must perforce adopt high-dudgeon. And this they did.
The director of China’s “Taiwan Affairs Office” (TAO) dismissed the idea that Taiwan’s CGA could legitimately enforce fisheries and anti-smuggling rules in Quemoy’s “restricted” waters — “there is no such thing as prohibited or restricted waters,” he averred, and “Taiwan will bear all the consequences.”
China’s TAO knows full well that both sides have acquiesced to a de facto division of coast guard enforcement in the Quemoy sectors of China’s Xiamen municipality waters since at least October 7, 1992, when Taiwan’s “Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area” (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) was last amended. But this did not inhibit it from posturing as the injured party. China Coast Guard was obliged to save face.
A few days after the “speed-boat” tragedy, on February 19, the CCG saw fit to pounce on an innocent Taiwan ferry boat conveying tourists to Quemoy which detoured into Xiamen Municipality jurisdiction to avoid dangerous shoals (a common maneuver) and detain it for 30 minutes whilst CCG officers checked the travel documentation of each passenger. All their papers were in order, and all was well. But the China Coast Guard was obliged to show who’s in charge there in Xiamen harbor’s non-Taiwan waters.
If Beijing wanted to escalate these incidents into a crisis, Taipei would know it. And so would the United States. The State Department’s reaction came quickly — the next day, actually. Spokesman Matthew Miller casually invoked the “status quo” in the Strait, a diplomatic codeword to China meaning “while we are not making a big deal about this, we’re watching.” Not that Beijing was tremorous of Mr. Miller’s pronouncements. Far from it. Beijing was far more sensitive to Taipei’s reaction.
In the middle of the last century, the American president had exerted almost irresistible pressure on the Republic of China president to abandon Quemoy and the offshores, and to consolidate Taiwan’s military in the close-defense of Taiwan and the Pescadores.
Three years ago in these pages, I wrote of “The Offshore Islands and Taiwan’s Future.” (June 14, 2021, https://taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/06/14/2003759120). I made the case that, by allowing its construction vessels and naval ships to abuse the environment, smuggling and fisheries enforcement jurisdictions of the Taiwan-administered offshore islands, China had been “pushing the envelope.”
There are significant political dangers to any Taipei government that allows the People’s Republic to encourage lawlessness and environmental despoliation in its offshore waters. If the post-1949 status quo in the offshore islands were contorted to the point that Taipei could not enforce its environmental, fisheries and customs authority there, Taipei would have no choice but to cede them to China’s jurisdiction and withdraw. Doing so would consolidate Taiwan’s international legitimacy — left over from the Japan Peace Treaty of 1951 — as an unsettled jurisdiction, the sovereignty of which would be dictated by the “self-determination of peoples” clause in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter. For Beijing, this is a consummation devoutly to be avoided.
The issue of Taiwan’s self-determination would arise immediately in the event of a major cataclysm in Taiwan’s “status quo” either through Chinese military action or by China’s disregard for Taiwan’s long-accepted authority in the offshores. For 70 years, the international community has tacitly indulged China’s rhetoric of a “one China principle” because it has “maintained peace and stability in the Strait.” Once China uses force (“including by boycotts or embargoes”) against Taiwan, that indulgence disappears.
United States policy, explicit in the Taiwan Relations Act, regards Quemoy and Matsu and the other offshore islands (but not necessarily the South China Sea reefs of Pratas and Itu Aba) as outside Taiwan’s scope, but comprehended within the concept of the “status quo.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, Washington would have been very happy for Taiwan to have abandoned the offshore islands. Chairman Mao (毛澤東), however, saw then-secretary of state John Foster Dulles’s policy as “designed to exchange Quemoy and Matsu for Taiwan and Penghu.” But by the 1970s, China’s thrust was aimed at the US president. As Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) told President Nixon on February 24, 1972, “Secretary Dulles wanted Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to give up the islands of Quemoy and Matsu so as to completely sever Taiwan and the mainland and draw a line there.” Premier Zhou pressed Nixon to “apply those [one China] principles while you are still in office.” Nixon never did fully “apply those principles” nor has any succeeding US president. In fact, US policy toward the offshore islands has been remarkably consistent. If China unilaterally changes the “status quo” in the offshores, US policy would acquiesce in Taipei’s own concomitant unilateral changes in the Strait.
Pushed to the extremes, it would be a tragedy for Taipei to quit the offshores and to consign the citizens of Quemoy and Matsu to Chinese communist dominion without their assent. But to pretend authority where it has none would be a greater tragedy — to relegate all Taiwan to a status subordinate to China. Whether the Taiwanese electorate can tolerate either — the severance of ungovernable Quemoy, Matsu and the offshores or the concession that all Taiwan and Penghu are subordinate to China — is the dilemma.
China’s stratagem is to delay this dilemma until the very last moment. For the time being, last month’s mini-crisis in “Quemoy” (Kinmen) has blown over. And for the foreseeable future, China will likely leave the offshores alone and will confine its “pre-planned” strategic crises in the Strait to other areas.
John J. Tkacik, Jr. is a retired US foreign service officer who has served in Taipei and Beijing and is now director of the Future Asia Project at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
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