US research monitor counts 69 Chinese coast guard incursions around Taiwan this year, 43 at Kinmen

Chinese coast guard ships have entered waters around Taiwan and its outlying islands 69 times so far in 2026, according to an incident database kept by the Taiwan Security Monitor, a research project at George Mason University in the United States. The tally, updated on 11 November, puts Kinmen far ahead of every other area, with 43 incursions recorded around the Kinmen island group.

The database lists 13 incursions at Dongsha, also known as the Pratas Islands, eight in waters east of Taiwan and three southwest of Taiwan, plus one each at Penghu and at Taiping Island in the Spratly group. Taken together, the entries show incursions recorded in six separate areas this year, not only around Kinmen.

The Kinmen count is already close to the full-year figure for 2025. Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration said in April that Chinese coast guard formations had crossed into Kinmen's restricted waters 46 times last year and entered the restricted waters around Dongsha 33 times, according to a report on the database published by Yahoo News Taiwan on 14 November.

The pace has picked up in November. The monitor noted that on 6 November Taiwan's coast guard expelled four Chinese vessels, numbered 14604, 14530, 14608 and 14531, from Kinmen's restricted waters, which it counted as the third such incursion of the month and the fifth in eight days.

The same four hulls returned on the afternoon of 9 November, entering in two pairs from east of Liaoluo and southwest of Zhaishan, Taiwan's coast guard said at the time. Its patrol boats shadowed the ships and broadcast warnings until the last one left at about 4:50 pm local time, and the agency described the formation's sailing in rough seas as unprofessional and irrational.

Beijing describes the patrols differently. China's coast guard claimed in late September that it had begun what it called regular law enforcement inspections in waters near Kinmen from that month. That is the Chinese agency's own characterisation.

Taiwan's coast guard rejected that account on 29 September, calling the patrols routine harassment and saying crossings into Kinmen's restricted waters had reached 35 for the year at that point. It also said it would keep ships deployed around the clock to respond.

The monitor's weekly report for 2 to 8 November, released on 10 November, said Chinese coast guard ships entered Kinmen's restricted waters on 2, 4 and 6 November, according to the Yahoo report. In the same week, Taiwan's defence ministry tracked 36 sorties by Chinese official ships, up from 17 the week before, with a single-day high of nine on 2 November.

The eight incidents east of Taiwan reflect a newer pattern. Ryan Martinson, an associate professor at the US Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute, wrote in July that the Chinese coast guard had kept an unbroken presence in waters east of Taiwan since early June, with two more ships sent on 4 July to relieve the formation already there. Earlier deployments to that area had usually been brief and tied to political events, he found.

Martinson assessed that a standing coast guard presence east of the island could let China switch more quickly to a so-called quarantine, in which ships sailing to or from Taiwan would be boarded or seized in the name of law enforcement. That is his analytical judgement about a possible future step, not an operation that has been observed.

For Taiwan, the database adds a measure of grey-zone pressure that daily counts of military aircraft and warships do not capture. Coast guard visits to Kinmen are now coming several times a week, and the year-to-date tally across all areas has already passed the level the coast guard reported at Kinmen for the whole of last year.