US commission chair calls China's coast guard patrols east of Taiwan highly destabilising

China's coast guard patrols in the waters east of Taiwan are highly destabilising and amount to an extension of Beijing's legal, political and information warfare, Randall Schriver, chair of the US Congress's US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said in Taipei on Tuesday 20 October, Reuters reported.

Schriver, a former US assistant secretary of defense, gave a keynote speech at an international conference on trends in China organised by the Mainland Affairs Council, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research and the National Science and Technology Council. National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu and the institute's chairman, Huo Shou-yeh, also addressed the forum, the Central News Agency reported.

According to Reuters and the Central News Agency, Schriver said the persistent coast guard presence east of the island was one of the most troubling developments he had seen in recent years. He argued that white-hulled ships carrying out what China calls law enforcement can look benign but in fact extend Beijing's sovereignty claim, and that the effect would be highly destabilising if China keeps turning that role into routine operations.

He offered an example reported by the Central News Agency. If a fishing boat got into trouble east of Taiwan and a Chinese vessel arrived first, outsiders might see a humanitarian rescue, but China would be exercising the powers of a sovereign state and reinforcing its message that it is the legitimate authority, he said. Schriver said such scenarios should be built into thinking on deterrence and operational concepts, and suggested considering counter-blockade drills with Japan covering the waters between Keelung and Yonaguni.

Wu told the same forum that China had used talks between Japan and the Philippines on their overlapping exclusive economic zones as a pretext to begin so-called law enforcement activity east of Taiwan in early June, and that Chinese coast guard ships now appear there every day, the Liberty Times and ETtoday reported. He said China has no legal claim to those waters, is not adjacent to them, and that the delimitation talks do not affect third parties.

Wu said Beijing claims Taiwan is unable or unwilling to protect the waters that a Japan-Philippines boundary would cover, and that China's reading of its one-China principle now reaches as far as the Philippines' Batanes islands. He said Taiwan's defence budget next year will stay at 3 percent of gross domestic product or more, which ETtoday reported as more than 19 percent of total government spending, and he urged partners to build a common operational picture of China's motives and behaviour.

Reuters noted that China has stepped up activity off Taiwan's east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols, and that Taiwanese officials believe Beijing is practising for a possible maritime blockade using overlapping military, paramilitary and civilian assets. China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the agency said.

Schriver also spoke about the stalled arms pipeline. US President Donald Trump has yet to approve a new package for Taiwan worth about 14 billion dollars, after calling such sales a negotiating chip following talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in May, though he approved about 11 billion dollars of arms in December, according to Reuters. Schriver said Trump's overall record on arms sales and training for Taiwan was good, but that with two more Trump-Xi meetings likely this year, at the APEC summit in China and the G20 in Florida, movement on the new package would probably come next year. He expected Washington to find a way, possibly by splitting the package or recasting parts of it as direct commercial sales or foreign military sales, and said support remained strong in Congress.

On training, Schriver said the military exchanges now under way between Taiwan and the United States took a long time to build and lift morale and professionalism as well as capability, adding that he had seen Taiwanese troops in classrooms and on training grounds, the Central News Agency reported.