Sat, Jun 20, 2026 page8

• If Beijing radios, say you are busy

  • By Ethan Connell Jonathan Walberg
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  On June 7, Hai Xun 06, a Chinese Maritime Safety Administration vessel operating with China Coast Guard ships east of Taiwan, radioed three passing merchant vessels — flagged in Singapore, Liberia and Benin — and asked for their ports of departure, destination and crew counts. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) broadcast back that the merchant vessels should pay no attention to Chinese inquiries, that the waters were not under Chinese jurisdiction and that the requests for information should stop. No ships were boarded. No inspections occurred. Bloomberg reported the operation as the first publicly known case of Chinese government vessels querying foreign commercial shipping in those waters.

  Chinese state media announced the “special maritime traffic law-enforcement operation” a day earlier in response to an announcement last month that Japan and the Philippines would begin formal talks on their maritime boundaries — talks Beijing characterized as touching on waters off Taiwan. The activity, and radio calls, was its answer.

  The Chinese radio communications were conducted in a quiet, polite, and procedural manner. That is precisely the problem: Beijing does not need these exchanges to sound threatening for them to serve a jurisdictional purpose.

  Beijing’s “gray zone” playbook around Taiwan has always relied more on administrative repetition than on dramatic escalation. Coast guard “patrols” become routine; “safety inspections” become standing operations; and “fisheries management” becomes a category of authority Beijing claims without ever having earned it. Each line item, taken alone, sounds bureaucratic. Stacked over years, the documented pattern has produced facts on the water that do not match the law on paper.

  Until this month, the technique was directed almost entirely at Taiwanese vessels. It has now been extended to foreign-flagged commercial shipping matters. The danger is not the content of the calls, it is the precedent that, when repeated quietly enough, allows Chinese maritime agencies to claim a regulatory role over international commercial traffic in waters where they have no recognized enforcement authority.

  Taipei has been on the receiving end of these tactics for years and knows what to do. International commercial shipping has not. The vessels that pass through the waters east of Taiwan operate under flag states and international classification societies, rather than under the authority of either Beijing or Taipei. If their captains begin to accept Chinese radio inquiries as part of normal transit, even out of caution rather than recognition, Beijing acquires something it cannot otherwise get: a record. That record becomes the case Beijing makes for pressure operations that have moved east of the strait since 2024.

  Geography, in this case, is incredibly important. The Taiwan Strait is the surface area most Taiwan observers watch.

  The waters east of Taiwan, less covered, are where any sustained-access, reinforcement or quarantine campaign would have to operate.

  They connect Taiwan to the wider Pacific and to the logistics arteries of US, Japanese and Philippine forces. Those waters will be the critical artery through which Taiwan’s external support either flows or is severed.

  However, the strategic significance of Beijing’s actions lies not in their immediate effects, but in the opportunities they create for future operations. For example, a quarantine-style operation, such as selective inspections of vessels suspected of carrying contraband under Chinese regulations, the declaration of exclusion zones around energy infrastructure, or coordinated information requests during a political crisis, would require a pre-existing record of routine Chinese maritime activity in the area for justification.

  Each polite radio communication now serves as documentation in this evolving case. The critical issue is not that these scenarios have already commenced, but that administrative practices established during peacetime facilitate their later introduction and obscure their escalation.

  Jurisdictional expansion does not occur through overt kinetic action, such as armed attack or invasion, but rather through incremental administrative actions. Each radio communication that elicits a response, even a firm refusal, is recorded. Similarly, each routine inquiry that remains uncontested further contributes to the accumulation of precedent.

  Beijing’s claims might shift from being contested to becoming normalized. National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) described this process on X, stating that the Hai Xun and China Coast Guard vessels were “harassing commercial ships in Taiwan’s EEZ to fabricate a facade of PRC jurisdiction,” reffering to the exclusive economic zone and the People’s Republic of China. The term “fabrication” is appropriate, as this jurisdiction lacks a basis in maritime law and is being constructed incrementally through open radio communications.

  Some observers might argue that concerns regarding the radio communications are exaggerated, noting that calls without enforcement do not constitute coercion, that no vessels were boarded and that the operation has concluded. However, that perspective overlooks the cumulative nature of administrative coercion. The history of Chinese maritime claim-building, including incidents at Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島), the Senkaku patrols, and the “nine-dash line” presentations, demonstrates a pattern of incremental actions presented as routine. For instance, the 2012 Scarborough standoff began with civilian vessel encounters and Chinese “fisheries enforcement,” ultimately resulting in a China Coast Guard cordon that remains in place.

  Each individual step appeared minor, but the lack of response allowed the claims to become normalized.

  The response should be small, persistent and unflashy. Taipei is already doing the most important part: documenting the operation publicly and instructing commercial vessels, on the record, to ignore Chinese broadcasts. The CGA should maintain that posture and turn the documentation into a public dataset, including incident logs, broadcast transcripts where available, and flag-state breakdowns.

  Washington’s calls to cease coercion suggest the US administration is willing to back the play; quiet outreach to Singapore, Liberia and Benin, and through them to the International Maritime Organization, can reinforce that no foreign-flagged captain is obliged to answer a Chinese maritime agency in the waters. Insurers and classification societies also benefit from clear guidance, preventing ambiguity from becoming precedent.

  The temptation is to treat all this as too small to matter, which plays right into Beijing’s hands.

  Ethan Connell is an assistant director at the Taiwan Security Monitor and a graduate student at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. His research focuses on maritime security and cross-strait military affairs. Jonathan Walberg is the associate director of the Taiwan Security Monitor. He is also a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, and a fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies.
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