Taiwan on Thursday took a group of foreign lawmakers on a coast guard patrol around its frontline islands just off the Chinese coast, underscoring efforts to shore up international support amid Beijing’s growing aggression in the region.
The lawmakers toured the waters around Kinmen, a set of Taiwan’s outlying islands that face the greatest risk of the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression. Sitting just a few miles off the coast of China, Kinmen has seen a persistent presence of Chinese vessels in its surrounding waters since 2024.
Alicia Kearns, a British lawmaker aboard the vessel, said the trip helps to understand the pressure faced by the Taiwanese people every day.
“If conflict comes to Taiwan, it comes for all of us: an estimated $10 trillion blow to the world economy—dwarfing COVID and the financial crisis—and the chips that power modern life gone overnight,” she wrote on X. “Nobody gets to sit this one out.”
This trip marks the first time an international delegation of lawmakers has been allowed on an active, routine coast guard patrol in the Taiwan Strait.
The group includes politicians from the UK, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and India, all members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a coalition that seeks to address the threats posed by the Chinese regime to trade, security, and human rights.
Chinese authorities expanded patrols in the waters surrounding Taiwan, as part of Beijing’s efforts to enforce its territorial claims. Just a day before the lawmakers’ tour, Taiwan’s coast guard said it drove away four Chinese vessels that sailed toward restricted waters near Kinmen.
Currently, Chinese authorities are preparing to open a new airport on an artificial island that is closer to Taiwan’s coastline. The Xiamen Xiang’an International Airport, set to start operations by the end of this year, is about 1.8 miles from Taiwan’s Kinmen.
After a close-up look at the Chinese airport during the tour, Luke de Pulford, executive director of the IPAC, described the experience as “salutary.”
“The world must wake up,” he said on X.
The trip came less than a week after Beijing announced a new “law enforcement” patrol in the waters east of Taiwan. The Chinese coast guard in a July 4 statement signaled the intention to normalize its presence in the waters it claimed to be “under China’s jurisdiction.”
The UK, France, and Germany have voiced concerns about what they called “novel Chinese activity” after China announced a similar patrol in early June.
The Chinese regime has defended the patrol as a response to an agreement that Japan and the Philippines reached in May to open talks to delimit their maritime borders. The regime’s foreign ministry has protested the decision, saying the discussed areas covered the waters east of Taiwan.
The Taiwanese government rejected Beijing’s claims, denouncing these acts as expansionism under the guise of law enforcement. Analysts who recently spoke to The Epoch Times linked these actions to Beijing’s strategy to prepare a full naval blockade of Taiwan.
An illustration shows the approximate distances between Kinmen, Taiwan’s main island, and China. Illustration by The Epoch Times, MapTiler
During the operation, China’s coast guard vessels radioed at least three commercial ships passing through waters east of Taiwan, asking for information such as crew numbers and destination ports, according to Taiwan’s coast guard. Taipei responded by telling these foreign ships to ignore such demands, noting that Beijing has no jurisdiction over its waters.
In 2024, the Chinese coast guard briefly boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat near Kinmen, checking its route plan and certificate—an incident that sparked strong protests from Taipei.
