Written by Jess Marinaccio.
Image credit: Fishing boats near Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan by the author.
With the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the Republic of China (ROC) became a fishing nation. Although claiming to control all of China, the ROC was physically located on an island, and fisheries were critical to boosting the economy and supplying food to the people.
However, as the fisheries industry grew, Taiwan’s nearshore fishing grounds were depleted both because of overfishing and because the size of ROC fishing grounds was drastically reduced as the Kuomintang withdrew from mainland China. To resolve issues of overfishing and depleted fish stocks, fishers pivoted to the wider Pacific Ocean and other global seas. For Pacific fisheries, by the 1960s, Taiwan’s major fishing bases were located in Vanuatu and the US territory of American Samoa, while fishing vessels from Taiwan also operated in the waters surrounding numerous other Pacific nations. During this period, fisheries became significantly impactful in shaping Taiwan-Pacific relations.
At sea, problems quickly arose because Taiwan’s fishing boats began operating in the Pacific just as maritime law was rapidly changing and Pacific countries were on the path to independence. To better control marine resources, independent Pacific nations–along with countries throughout the world–expanded their territorial waters from 3 nautical miles, the standard since the 1700s, to 12. The United States also started the practice in 1945 of claiming marine resources beyond territorial waters, with countries subsequently establishing 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) where they controlled resources like fish and minerals. This practice was formalised as international law in 1982 in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which came into force in 1994.
For the ROC and Pacific nations, changes to maritime law created numerous diplomatic conflicts as, after the 1950s, Taiwan fishing boats repeatedly crossed into the territorial waters and EEZs claimed by Pacific nations. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan fishing boats were accused of or detained for illegal fishing in Papua New Guinea, Australia, Niue, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu. Although Taiwan fishers sometimes purposefully violated territorial waters and EEZs, because maritime boundaries were constantly changing, accidental incidents of illegal fishing were also common.
Illegal fishing by Taiwan crews complicated ROC relationships with Pacific countries that recognised the ROC while also necessitating contact with Pacific governments that recognised the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or that recognised neither the ROC nor the PRC. In Tuvalu, for example, illegal fishing incidents occurred before Tuvalu had decided whether to recognise the ROC or the PRC and were only resolved after Tuvalu and the ROC formed diplomatic relations and the ROC purchased licenses to legally fish in Tuvalu’s waters. For the Cook Islands, although New Zealand (with which the Cook Islands has a free association relationship) officially recognised the PRC in 1972, the Cook Islands still signed a fisheries agreement with a Taiwan fishing association after suspected illegal fishing in the mid-1970s. Illegal fishing also caused tension between Australia and the ROC before Australia broke relations in December 1972, and even extended unofficial ties after 1972 because illegal fishing did not stop when diplomatic relations did.
For Taiwan fishers, while illegal fishing could bring profits, if boats were caught and detained, this resulted in fines, jail, the confiscation of boats, and separation from families if boat owners failed to pay fines or insisted that fishers stay abroad while charges against boats were appealed. Illegal fishing incidents also required the mobilisation of Chinese diaspora communities in Pacific nations, who provided food, accommodation, and money for fishers while they waited to return home. Even as the ROC struggled to maintain international recognition, in the Pacific, illegal fishing made Taiwan and the ROC government difficult to ignore.
I explore how illegal fishing has impacted ROC/Taiwan foreign affairs in my current research project, “Disputes at Port, Disputes at Sea: Taiwan-Pacific Diplomacy and Legal and Illegal Fishing in the 20th-Century Pacific”. One example I examine–an illegal fishing incident involving four vessels, the Lanyang (蘭陽) Nos. 1 and 2 and the Yongyuan (永元) Nos. 21 and 22, which occurred in Australia in 1972–demonstrates how complicated illegal fishing cases could become. It shows how these cases inserted the ROC and Taiwan fishers into Pacific affairs, requiring countries to engage with the ROC regardless of whether they officially recognised it.
In September 1972, the Royal Australian Navy detained the Lanyang Nos. 1 and 2 and the Yongyuan Nos. 21 and 22 for illegally fishing in Australian waters. Despite protests that the boats had unwittingly entered Australian waters because their navigational instruments had malfunctioned, the Australian courts were unmoved. The courts fined the captain of each boat and ordered the four boats confiscated to demonstrate to other fishing vessels the consequences of illegal activity. Yet, this decision left the crews of the four boats–a total of 64 fishers–stranded in Australia as the boat owners appealed the court ruling. The owners refused to pay for fishers to fly back to Taiwan before their appeals had been exhausted, hoping to win their boats back so fishers could return to Taiwan by sea, which was far less expensive. Eventually, after two appeals, Australia’s highest court ruled that only two of the boats would be confiscated and the other two released, allowing the fishers to return to Taiwan. However, this occurred only after the fishers had been stranded for four months, during which time they were panicked and reportedly had only limited food and supplies.
The parties involved in mediating the incident were wide-ranging: Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, immigration agency, and courts; the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Taiwan Fisheries Department; the Kaohsiung Fishermen’s Association; the ROC embassy in Canberra and consulate in Perth; the overseas Chinese community in Darwin where the fishers were detained; and the Australian and ROC press. Yet, even with all of these institutions involved, the fishers were still stuck in Australia for four months. When ROC-Australia ties ended later in December 1972, illegal fishing arrests continued; without official institutions to mediate disputes, fishers were sometimes stranded for even longer periods.
Similar incidents, which required significant resources to address and attracted transfixed public attention, occurred frequently in the Pacific. Regardless of whether these incidents occurred before, during, or after a country recognised the ROC, they could not be ignored and created vast networks connecting the ROC/Taiwan to countries and communities throughout the Pacific. Even now, Taiwan’s fisheries, whether legal or illegal, remain a powerful thread linking Taiwan to the Pacific; today, both Pacific nations that officially recognise Taiwan and those that do not still consistently engage with Taiwan over Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing cases and Taiwan’s impact on Pacific attempts to develop domestic fisheries.
This research was completed with support from the Taiwan Fellowship Program.
Dr Jess Marinaccio was most recently employed as an Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She also previously worked for Tuvalu’s Foreign Affairs Department as well as its Embassy in Taiwan. Dr. Marinaccio researches Pacific understandings of diplomacy and Taiwan’s Pacific fisheries and has published in journals including The Contemporary Pacific, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, The Journal of Pacific History, The Journal of Global History, Nations and Nationalism, and Asia Pacific Viewpoint.
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