There are likely tactical implications when comparing the recent incursion of a Chinese military drone into the airspace of the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands (Dongsha, 東沙群島) and a report last year on China building oil rigs within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around that island.
The Ministry of National Defense on Saturday said a Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) surveillance and reconnaissance drone was detected entering the territorial airspace of the Pratas Islands at 5:44am, and then left a few minutes later, after the military broadcast a warning through an international channel.
The Jamestown Foundation think tank in a report published in September last year said that oil rigs could serve as relay stations for drone communications, and that China’s oil rigs around the Pratas Islands are boosting its “kill chain,” as well as its command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting (C5ISRT) capabilities.
Photo courtesy of Chen Ching-neng
China has 12 oil rigs around Pratas Islands, owned by the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), including seven rig structures, three floating production storage and offloading vessels, and two semi-submersible oil platforms, it said.
These state-owned structures have dual-use potential and “may be more valuable for constraining Taiwan’s space than for their nominal commercial purpose of extracting oil,” the report said.
These structures could be integrated into the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp’s “Blue Ocean Information Network,” functioning as relay stations for drone communications, and “facilitate a full range of coercion, blockade, bombardment and/or invasion scenarios against Pratas or Taiwan more generally,” it said.
Then-CNOOC chairman Wang Yilin (王宜林) in 2012 said “large-scale deep-water rigs are our mobile national territory and a strategic weapon,” the report said, warning that oil rigs “advance territorial claims, establish creeping jurisdictional presence in contested spaces and shape the operational environment in Beijing’s favor without open conflict — often under the guise of commercial activity.”
Although these actions are nominally commercial, they are a classic example of China’s “gray zone” threats, Institute for National Defense and Security Research assistant research fellow Alice Yang (楊長蓉) said.
On the surface, they are tools for developing resources, but they could also be used to gather intelligence and deploy the military, Yang said.
Establishing offshore platforms inside Taiwan’s EEZ without permission infringes on UN law, but Taiwan cannot dispute this, as it is not a UN member, she added.
In addition to diplomatic protests, Taiwan should respond to China’s drone and platform incursions by clarifying domestic laws, coordinating with agencies and bolstering international legal arguments to better protect key maritime resources, Yang said.
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