The China Coast Guard (CCG) took on a novel and important role during Monday’s “Joint Sword-2024B” military drills, being deployed for the first time to encircle Taiwan and practice enforcing a blockade in the event of an invasion, academics said on Tuesday.
The military exercises ran from 5:02am to 6:04pm, and covered the Taiwan Strait and areas to the north, south and east of Taiwan, involving the army, navy, air force and rocket force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese Ministry of National Defense said.
Apart from the PLA’s involvement, the CCG also played a significant role in the drills, said Tzeng Wei-feng (曾偉?), an assistant research fellow at National Chengchi University’s Institute of International Relations.
Photo: CNA
The CCG conducted “law enforcement exercises” only in the waters east of Taiwan during the “Joint Sword-2024A” drills in May, but during Monday’s drills, it expanded those operations “from a single area east of Taiwan to encircle the entire island,” China Central Television reported.
Based on the areas covered by the CCG vessels during the drills, Tzeng said that it is likely the CCG would play “a crucial role in enforcing a blockade” of Taiwan in the event of an invasion, thus enabling the PLA to mainly focus on deterring “external forces” from the east, such as military units from the US and Japan.
“This is quite different from previous exercises,” Tzeng said, adding that the participation of the CCG in the PLA’s drills also raises the question of whether China would use it to engage in more “gray zone” operations against Taiwan.
“It could include [the CCG] boarding or directly intercepting Taiwanese vessels to carry out so-called harassment,” he said.
He also attributed the CCG’s more prominent role to the “localization” of the Taiwan Strait in rhetoric used by Beijing, thereby emphasizing its claim that Taiwan is part of China and the Strait part of its territorial waters.
“The CCG’s role is relatively less sensitive compared with the PLA, as it is not a direct military force — although it is still armed,” Tzeng said.
If China wants to emphasize the “localization” of the Taiwan Strait, the CCG’s law enforcement activities in the Strait play an important role in highlighting such a narrative, he added.
Echoing Tzeng, Wen-Ti Sung (宋文笛), a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, also described Beijing’s first-time use of the CCG to encircle Taiwan as a “novelty,” while adding that Kinmen’s exclusion from the military drills might be due to Beijing penciling the island into the CCG’s sphere of operation, “rather than the PLA’s.”
Meanwhile, the “remarkably short duration” of the drills was also worth noting, Sung said.
The half-day duration of the military exercises was likely driven by “both tension management and cost management,” in light of the US presidential campaign and the Chinese government’s own ongoing fiscal problems, he added.
After President William Lai’s (賴清德) Double Ten National Day speech, China used Monday’s drills to “send a very visual display of its displeasure” about Lai, Sung said.
By holding the drills, Beijing also aimed to send a message to Washington, urging the US to “stop enabling the internationalization of the Taiwan issue,” the academic said.
Sung predicted that Beijing might increase the frequency of its military exercises to “normalize” such actions, but decrease the intensity of drills to “manage costs and regional states’ threat perception of China.”
In his speech, Lai said that the “Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China [PRC] are not subordinate to each other,” adding that the PRC “has no right to represent Taiwan.”
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