By Jun Okumura
Is there more to the Chinese red coral poachers in Japan’s EEZ waters than meets the eye?
There’s talk out there that the Chinese red coral poachers swarming the Japanese EEZ waters near the Ogasawa and Izu Islands right through the preparations and after-party of the November 10 bilateral summit in Beijing between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping are agents of the Chinese maritime authorities. It’s plausible, but highly unlikely. But they don’t have to be in order to be useful to the Chinese government. And I do expect the problem to abate in the near future. Let me make my case.
That the Chinese maritime authorities are capable of such an act is beyond doubt. They have a large number of deputized ocean-going fishing vessels in their pay to assist the surveillance authorities, a fact which they make little attempt to hide. Fishing vessels have been harbingers of more aggressive moves by the Chinese maritime authorities as well as the PLA Navy, particularly in the contested areas in the South China Sea. And this would not be the first time that the Chinese government has engaged in provocative acts just as they are about to make mutually conciliatory gestures with a geopolitical adversary (case in point: the Xi-Modi summit and the China-India Ladakh faceoff).
But the Ogasawara and Izu neighborhood would be a strange place to seek provocation. It is within the Japanese EEZ as recognized under international law and, unlike the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and its surroundings or the areas under contention in the South China Sea, the Chinese government does not dispute this point. Indeed, anything that the Chinese authorities might attempt through the fishing boats would be a first in this respect. Moreover, it would have to be conducted surreptitiously, which entails a risk of security breaches, as some of the vessels are inevitably detained and searched and their crews questioned, all by the Japanese Coast Guard.
Read the full story at The Diplomat