From all accounts, the Ta Chin Man 88 fishing boat from the Taiwan island has violated the Chinese mainland’s fishing laws.
In April, the local government of Quanzhou, Fujian province, announced an annual fishing moratorium from May 1 to Aug 16, during which all fishing activities except angling were forbidden. And yet the Taiwan fishing boat was caught undertaking trawling operations in the Quanzhou waters, while the mesh size of the net they used was much smaller than the national standard.
That the island’s media claims the boat was caught 27 miles (43.4 kilometers) northeast of Kinmen changes neither the fact that it was caught in Quanzhou waters nor the fact that Kinmen, like the island itself, is part of China where Chinese laws apply and the Chinese police hold jurisdiction.
What turned a normal law enforcement case into a tension-invoking incident is the Taiwan “coast guard” vessels’ attempt to “help” the law-breaking trawler. When the Fujian Coast Guard issued warnings and drove them away in accordance with the law, certain media outlets on the island hyped up the incident to claim the island’s fishermen were “bullied”.
Their hyping up of the incident is so absurd that Julian Kuo Jeng-liang, a former member of Taiwan’s “legislative yuan”, said in an interview to a local TV channel that their local “official” documents mentioned the mainland’s fishing moratorium and the fishermen had long known that. Even Taiwan analysts asked why the fishing boat insisted on fishing in the area during a moratorium.
So the claim by Hsieh Ching-chin, spokesperson of Taiwan’s “coast guard”, that the mainland has been applying stronger law enforcement during the fishing moratorium and there are “political factors” behind, is absurd. The Fujian Coast Guard is enforcing a Chinese law in Chinese waters and nobody from Taiwan, which is part of China, should interfere in it. Contrary to Hsieh’s claims, it was the Democratic Progressive Party that was overstepping its limits.