Chinese coast guard ships tail eight Japanese patrol vessels sheltering from a typhoon in the Taiwan Strait

Five China Coast Guard ships shadowed eight Japan Coast Guard patrol vessels that sailed into the Taiwan Strait to ride out Typhoon Champi, Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration said on 23 October. The Taiwanese agency said the Japanese ships began moving south along the median line of the strait from 6 a.m. on 22 October and headed for waters southwest of Qimei in the Penghu islands, outside Taiwan's contiguous zone.

The Coast Guard Administration said it tracked the Japanese cutters and the Chinese ships following them throughout, using joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. It said the Japanese vessels were manoeuvring at sea to avoid the storm and had entered the area under procedures that respected the Taiwanese coast guard's law-enforcement authority, and that Taiwan offered them friendly support on humanitarian and mutual-aid grounds.

In its statement, the agency said the Taiwan Strait is international water under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that ships of every country enjoy freedom of navigation beyond territorial seas. It accused the China Coast Guard of exploiting a natural disaster to trail and monitor foreign government ships in order to create a false impression that China has jurisdiction over the strait and that the strait is Chinese internal water. The agency said such conduct endangered freedom of navigation and challenged maritime order and safety.

The Coast Guard Administration said its crews had been told to keep watching Chinese ships around the clock during the typhoon, alongside their disaster-relief duties, and to take necessary action to defend navigation in the strait. China's coast guard and government had not commented publicly on the Japanese ships in the reports reviewed for this article.

The Liberty Times reported on the evening of 22 October that the Japanese ships broadcast a typhoon-avoidance notice on their automatic identification system transponders. Citing records compiled by the Taiwan Adiz military tracking page, the paper listed them as the helicopter-carrying cutters Reimei, Yashima and Ryukyu and the patrol vessels Matsushima, Taketomi, Kabira, Irabu and Osumi. Those individual names have not been confirmed by Taiwan's coast guard.

The same report said a Chinese coast guard group that had already gone into port to shelter from the storm put back to sea to follow the Japanese ships. It named the 5,000-tonne cutters Daishan, hull number 2501, and 2502, along with the Type 818 patrol ships Baita, hull number 2304, and Xiushan, hull number 2305. The Taiwanese coast guard put the number of Chinese ships at five, one more than the newspaper named.

Earlier on 22 October, the Liberty Times reported that Taketomi and Irabu were the first to arrive, approaching Penghu from the north. Two China Coast Guard ships, hull numbers 2504 and 2301, that had been trailing Japanese vessels were not seen near them at that point and had returned to the port of Xiamen as the storm closed in, the paper said.

It is not the first time Chinese ships have trailed Japanese government vessels taking typhoon shelter near Penghu. In August, the Liberty Times reported that the Japanese cutter Urado was followed and then flanked by several China Coast Guard ships about 35 nautical miles from Penghu while avoiding an earlier typhoon, at a time when China's maritime safety authority had announced traffic controls on ships heading north through the strait's southern entrance.