Analysis: What's China Doing With Its Massed Fishing Fleet?

TaiwanPlus News

TaiwanPlus gets defense expert Yuster Yu's reaction to a New York Times article pointing out huge numbers of Chinese civilian fishing vessels seeming to act in coordination.

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00:00Assuming that these civilian vessels were directed by someone inside the PLA Navy or inside the

00:05Chinese government to take these actions, what do you think this says about China's

00:08strategy moving forward when it comes to conflicts in the waters around China and Taiwan?

00:12My first thought was that this was probably intended for maybe to prevent or interfere

00:21with potential U.S. intervention in the case of Taiwan crisis. It doesn't look like they need

00:29to do that for blockade of Taiwan solely for blockade of Taiwan. And the way I see it is that

00:39if you have thousands of fishing boats moving around in that area that creates a lot of problems for

00:48the U.S. overhead image imagery capabilities. These days they use AI and then they honestly

00:55I don't think I trained to train the model to monitor and differentiate targeted in this kind

01:03of situation. In addition to that, there's also the noise that the boats can generate

01:10that could interfere with the American's capability to detect underwater movements.

01:17In your career as a naval expert, have you ever seen something like this before?

01:21And how do you think navies, either the Taiwanese Navy or the U.S. Navy, how could they respond to this?

01:27No, on a much smaller scale that I've seen, but not like this, a 200, almost 300 mile

01:34and the line of barriers at sea, that's the first time I think everybody has heard of. But the reality is

01:44to prevent, to coordinate an effective operation with civilian vessels, civilian captains, fishing boats.

01:54It's going to be extremely difficult. The Taiwan Navy has pretty limited capability

02:01to operate further out, primarily because of the air defense capability. They need the air cover.

02:10I don't think that the Navy would fire civilian vessels. And even if they just ignore the international

02:19law and then fire the civilian vessels, it's not wise to do so because you're depleting your

02:26ammo very quickly. The article doesn't confirm why these ships are acting the way they are,

02:31but do you have any other theories beyond just practicing for a blockade of Taiwan or interdiction

02:35against the U.S. Navy as to why these vessels are acting this way?

02:38If you look at that area, it doesn't look like the area that one would expect to interfere with

02:47the U.S. naval operation. Maybe potentially it's just people see patterns out of the fishing activity.

02:57Potentially, what if there's an underwater mishap, a maritime mishap, and then

03:04China was trying to conduct search and rescue operation or salvage operation. And with that kind

03:10of, it does, thousands of fishing boats does attract attention away from whatever is really happening.

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