Taiwan Strait Tensions - China's Latest Move Explained

Gray zone tactics are coercive actions designed to change facts on the ground without crossing the threshold into open war.

The behaviour of China's Coast Guard issuing direct commands to foreign commercial vessels while patrolling the waters east of Taiwan in early June is the latest iteration in the CCP's deployment of a growing flotilla of People's Liberation Army or PLA Navy and Coast Guard vessels around Taiwan.

It's part of a slowly growing grey zone pressure campaign aimed at convincing the island's 23 million people that resistance to a takeover would be futile.

While Beijing has previously simulated blockades in large-scale drills, these latest efforts by China's Coast Guard hint at what Taipei fears could be a dangerous escalation at some future date – the creation of a maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan.

In recent months, China has also shifted its terminology and expanded its maritime claims in the region.

This latest behaviour of China's coast guard is believed to be a result of Beijing's designating the Taiwan Strait and several areas around Taiwan to be what it calls its coastal waters.

To understand what's behind this, we need to go back to the end of May.

On May 28th, Japanese Prime Minister Sane Takeichi and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. held a summit in Tokyo where they officially announced the commencement of formal negotiations to delimit the maritime boundaries of their overlapping Exclusive Economic Zones, or EEZs.

Chinese state media, CGTN, appeared perturbed by the meeting, reporting how these discussions between Japan and the Philippines marked a significant geopolitical shift, moving their relationship from general security cooperation into a highly formalised effort to legally lock down their shared north-south maritime borders.

While Japan and the Philippines are key maritime neighbours in the Western Pacific, the specific area where their 200 nautical mile EEZs overlap sits directly east of Taiwan.

Because of this unique geography, the talks have rapidly turned into a multi-nation diplomatic flashpoint.

Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the negotiation zone heavily overlaps with its own claimed Eastern EEZ.

While Taiwan supported peaceful maritime dialogue, it actively pressured both Tokyo and Manila to ensure Taiwanese fishing rights and sovereign interests are not infringed upon.

In response, Japan publicly clarified that any bilateral agreement would not be legally binding on third parties.

However, on May 29th, the very day after the announcement, Beijing fiercely condemned the talks, calling them illegal and void.

The CCP reasserted China's claims over Taiwan and argued that the waters involved fall under Chinese jurisdiction, calling them its coastal waters.

Then, on June 6th, China's Ministry of Transport and Coast Guard launched what it called Maritime Traffic Law Enforcement Operations in the waters east of Taiwan, effectively expanding their grey zone patrol footprint to counter the Tokyo-Manila legal alignment.

China also sent survey ships into the same waters, and in a move to further increase the pressure, sailed their Fujian aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait around the same time.