Written by Ming-hui Tang
Image credit: Coast Guard Administration, Ocean Affairs Council, Taiwan (R.O.C.) / Wikimedia Commons
On 4 July, the China Coast Guard announced that it was conducting ‘routine law-enforcement patrols’ east of what it called ‘China’s Taiwan island’. The statement did more than report the location of two ships. It described patrols, vessel verification, fishery protection and rescue operations in waters said to be under Chinese jurisdiction.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard offered a different picture. It reported tracking two Chinese coast guard vessels 54 nautical miles east of Hualien, outside Taiwan’s restricted waters but within its exclusive economic zone, and rejected Beijing’s operation as ‘fake law enforcement, real expansion’.
The distinction matters. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an exclusive economic zone is distinct from territorial waters, and foreign vessels retain navigation rights. The strategic issue was therefore not the mere presence of Chinese ships. It was Beijing’s public performance of administrative authority: the China Coast Guard claimed that it was enforcing Chinese law, maintaining order and protecting fishermen around Taiwan.
This is a form of jurisdictional enclosure. Beijing need not seize every maritime feature or close every sea lane. It can narrow the political and legal space available to its neighbours by repeatedly acting as if contested waters, islands and communities already fall within an expanding Chinese administrative domain. Ships make enforcement visible. State media make resistance appear illegitimate. Policy-facing scholarship supplies historical and legal vocabulary. Repetition is then used to turn a claim into the appearance of governance.
The same script travels south and north
The pattern is visible well beyond Taiwan. On 10 July, the state-owned China Daily released an AI-generated animation mocking the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award. A monkey holding the award was thrown into the sea by hands marked ‘USA’ and ‘Japan’, before being blasted by a water cannon from what appeared to be a Chinese coast guard vessel. The accompanying message portrayed Philippine politicians as performers following music written in Washington and Tokyo.
Days later, a Filipino sailor was injured during a confrontation with Chinese coast guard personnel near Second Thomas Shoal. Philippine officials said their personnel exercised restraint and continued to rely on diplomacy and the 2016 arbitral award. The juxtaposition was stark: an online water cannon converted coercion into comedy, while a real maritime encounter produced a physical injury.
At almost the same time, Jinan University publicised a workshop whose participants claimed that the Philippines’ Batanes Islands legally belonged to ‘China’s Taiwan island’. The university’s notice said that the meeting served major national strategic needs. To Taiwan’s north, Japan’s Joint Staff recorded a Chinese destroyer conducting live-fire training southwest of Okinotorishima while operating alongside other Chinese vessels and a Russian frigate.
These events are not legally identical. Naval training in an exclusive economic zone is not automatically unlawful, and provocative academic claims are not government orders. Their timing also does not prove that one central directive controlled every action. Analysis should not turn proximity into an organisational chart.
But demanding a smoking-gun instruction sets the evidentiary threshold too high. A whole-of-state effect can emerge from institutions that share political incentives and a common strategic vocabulary even when operational coordination is incomplete. China Daily later defended its animation as satire while repeating the claim that Philippine policy had been outsourced to external powers. Jinan University explicitly connected its sovereignty workshop to national strategy. The defensible conclusion is not that every output came from one command. It is that official media, policy-facing academia and maritime agencies can reinforce the same nationalist frame while the state retains room to embrace or disclaim individual messages.
Taiwan is the hinge, not the edge
Taiwan sits between the Batanes Islands and Japan’s southwestern approaches. That geography makes it more than another target in a list of regional disputes. It is the connecting hinge of Beijing’s maritime narrative.
The Batanes argument absorbs Taiwan into a Chinese territorial story and then uses that story to reach southwards into the Philippines. China Coast Guard patrols east of Hualien portray waters adjacent to Taiwan as a field of domestic law enforcement. Pressure around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and Japan’s southwestern islands adds a historical frame in which Japanese security policy can be labelled a revival of militarism. Different cases serve the same political proposition: neighbouring governments are not fully autonomous legal actors but proxies or occupants of spaces that Beijing can redefine.
This framing also targets cooperation. By presenting Manila as a singer performing American and Japanese lyrics, Chinese messaging raises the domestic political cost of coast guard coordination, maritime-domain awareness and intelligence sharing. It encourages regional audiences to treat coercion as the result of Philippine, Japanese or Taiwanese ‘alignment’, rather than as a rule-of-law problem. Yet the Quad foreign ministers’ July meeting in Manila reaffirmed support for ASEAN unity and centrality. Cooperation does not have to displace ASEAN or become an anti-China military bloc.
For Taiwan, the danger is not only that a false claim will persuade everyone. It is that fragmented incidents will be debated separately until the larger administrative performance disappears from view. A ship track may be published by one agency, a synthetic video analysed by civil society and a legal claim answered days later by another ministry. Beijing’s advantage lies in connecting sea, screen and sovereignty faster than democratic institutions can connect their evidence.
From rebuttal to a regional evidence network
Taiwan should answer by building a public regional evidence network with Japan and the Philippines. This would not be a new alliance or a platform for sharing classified targeting data. It would be an evidentiary commons: a set of compatible practices that makes coercive incidents easier to verify, compare and explain.
First, Taiwan should create a rapid public evidence protocol for maritime encounters. The Coast Guard, fisheries authorities and relevant civilian agencies should release time-stamped vessel tracks, geolocated imagery and a short legal assessment in a consistent format. Each release should distinguish territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones and air-defence identification zones. Precision matters because careless legal claims make democratic rebuttals easier to discredit.
Second, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines should develop common procedures for authenticating synthetic media. Public agencies and independent researchers could preserve original files, record provenance, publish cryptographic hashes where appropriate and use a shared vocabulary for levels of confidence. The purpose is not to label every hostile image ‘AI-generated’, but to show what has been verified, what remains uncertain and how the conclusion was reached.
Third, the three sides need multilingual legal communication. A claim answered only in Mandarin or a domestic press release does not shape regional debate. Short explainers in Chinese, English, Japanese and Filipino should connect the location of an incident to the applicable legal rule and clarify whether the dispute concerns navigation, resources, territorial sovereignty or the performance of enforcement authority.
Fourth, Taiwan should institutionalise liaison among coast guard professionals, legal scholars, open-source researchers, technology firms and newsrooms. Formal diplomacy may be constrained, particularly for Taiwan, but recurring Track 1.5 and Track 2 exchanges can still establish contact points and publication standards before the next crisis. Taiwan can contribute maritime data, experience in countering influence operations and a strong civic technology community. It should be a provider of regional security infrastructure, not merely a recipient of reassurance.
Critics may argue that such a network would harden bloc politics or encourage escalation. That risk should shape its design. The public layer should rely on non-sensitive data, cite international law, state uncertainty and remain open to independent audit. Its credibility would come from showing evidence that even sceptical audiences can inspect, not from asking them to accept another government narrative.
The contest is ultimately over who defines normality. If each patrol, legal claim and synthetic image is treated as a separate irritation, staged enforcement can harden into accepted geography. Taiwan’s exposed location can instead become an institutional advantage: it can connect the evidence produced to its north and south before that evidence is lost in national silos.
The first island chain will not be secured by ships alone. If Beijing’s strategy is to turn performance into normality, Taiwan’s answer must be to turn evidence into regional memory.
Ming-hui Tang is a board member of the Taiwan Security and Development Association and a PhD candidate at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of National Development. His research examines geopolitics, regional security and cross-Strait affairs. He writes on X at @Tang_Rean.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Maritime Borders and Fisheries in Taiwan.