Posted on November 18, 2024
HONG KONG—As China faced off with its Pacific neighbors this year, two ships provided an intimidating presence: The world’s longest coast guard patrol ships. One hundred and twenty-three feet longer than their American equivalents, they have become floating symbols and enforcers of Beijing’s territorial ambitions.
One of the pair, the Haijing 5901, came to be known this year in the Philippine media as the “monster” after it showed up during and after clashes near tiny shoals claimed by both countries in the South China Sea.
Its sister ship, the Haijing 2901, played a starring role in Chinese military drills around Taiwan last month that Beijing cast as a warning to Taiwan’s new president over his rejection of China’s claims to the self-ruled island. It was an unusual deployment for a military branch that in other countries typically focuses on law enforcement and rescue.
China’s transformation of its coast guard into a force that can take the lead in open-water confrontations is a vital and telling piece of Beijing’s strategy to dominate a swath of the Pacific, a mission against which the U.S. is committing significant resources.
The coast guard has expanded beyond any of its rivals over the past decade, bolstered by a shipbuilding spree that has also built up China’s navy and maritime militia—a state-sponsored force rooted in the country’s fishing fleet. Together they help press Beijing’s claims to Taiwan, most of the South China Sea and Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea.
The coast guard must “resolutely defend our country’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said during a visit to its East China Sea command last year, where he watched video of one of the cutters.
Coast-guard cutters are traditionally responsible for stopping smugglers, enforcing fishing regulations and conducting rescues. The need for speed and maneuverability has generally placed limits on their size.
At 541 feet, they are nearly twice the size of the biggest ships in the Philippine coast guard. That ensures they would prevail if ramming Philippine vessels—as often happens in standoffs in the South China Sea—and allows them to function as command-and-control centers for groups of smaller vessels.
They each have a 76mm cannon, remote-control water cannons, a helicopter landing pad and an estimated range of more than 17,000 miles—making them capable of sailing more than halfway around the world on one fueling. They represent a shift to a more confrontational role in territorial disputes, analysts say.
“The only reason to have a coast-guard ship that large is essentially to enforce a claim or to make a claim—it’s intimidation,” said Ray Powell, director of the SeaLight project at Stanford University, which tracks Chinese maritime activity. “There’s no reason a coast guard needs a ship that large to rescue fishermen and enforce border security.”
The giant coast guard ships, officially referred to as Zhaotou-class patrol cutters, were launched in 2014 and 2016. China’s coast guard is the world’s largest maritime law enforcement fleet, with more than 150 regional and oceangoing patrol vessels, the Pentagon estimated last year. The U.S. has about 80 coast guard cutters of a comparable type.
In October, China’s coast guard, which counts former navy ships among its fleet, carried out its first joint patrol with Russia in the Arctic.
As it has grown in strength, it has taken a more muscular approach. “The Chinese have somewhat mainstreamed the idea that the coast guard could be used for more assertive patrolling, much more coercive movements like ramming into ships,” said Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
When China’s military carried out its largest exercises yet in the air and sea around Taiwan in early October, Chinese state television showed the Haijing 2901 leading a flotilla, while the coast guard posted an image on its website of the ship beside Taiwan which depicted the vessel as the same size as the island.
“This is very fierce—it’s so huge,” the post read.
A photomontage shared by the Chinese coast guard shows the Haijing 2901 beside the island of Taiwan
“Whether it is endurance, collision resistance, seaworthiness, et cetera, the ship has a greater advantage over the law enforcement ships in the surrounding areas,” said the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Officials in Taiwan took note of the substantial coast guard presence, calling it a pressure tool to advance China’s claim that the self-ruled island is its territory.
“We are particularly concerned. We have never seen so many coast guard vessels around Taiwan,” a senior Taiwanese security official said.
The Haijing 2901 and its fleet were spotted off the island’s eastern coast, which faces away from the mainland, suggesting China might use coast guard vessels as part of a blockade of Taiwan, the official said.
Tracking data from maritime analytics provider Marine Traffic indicate the ship was dispatched in February to the Matsu Islands, a group of Taiwan-controlled islands near the Chinese mainland, as tensions flared over the deaths of two Chinese men whose boat was being pursued by Taiwan’s coast guard around another Taiwanese archipelago, Kinmen.
The Haijing 5901 made its presence known in the South China Sea this summer in testy encounters with the Philippines over islands claimed by both countries. When a Chinese boat rammed a Philippines boat in June, severing the thumb of a Filipino sailor, the cutter headed to the site, then sailed onward in the following days past several Philippine islands.
It then spent most of July and early August at Sabina Shoal, where a group of Chinese vessels had surrounded a single Philippine coast guard boat for months.
The Philippine ship had been tasked with trying to prevent Chinese reclamation activities, in which reefs and islets are built up into more permanent islands. In August, the ship was rammed by a Chinese coast guard vessel. When it returned to port in September, four of its crew were stretchered to shore.
Japan says Chinese coast guard ships make regular patrols near the Senkaku islands, which are administered by Japan but also claimed by China, which calls them the Diaoyu islands. The Haijing 2901, based in the East China Sea, didn’t appear to join the patrols this year, according to the tracking data from Marine Traffic.
A Philippine vessel is hit by water cannons from two Chinese ships near the contested Second Thomas Shoal, in the South China Sea.
Japan said this year that it would build an even larger coast-guard vessel, expected to be about 650 feet in length. Unlike China’s, the Japanese ship will be unarmed.
While Japan says it is building the ship to help move people and supplies to respond to natural disasters, China is also likely a factor, analysts said. In the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Japan could need to evacuate residents from Japan’s Yonaguni island, about 70 miles off northern Taiwan.
“We would need to use a large ship to do that,” said Kentaro Furuya, a professor at Japan’s Coast Guard Academy.
Japan previously boasted the world’s largest coast guard patrol ships, 492-foot vessels built to escort shipments of spent nuclear fuel.
Those ships appear to have inspired China after a confrontation in which Japan—with one of its large cutters present—raised a North Korean spy boat that sank in Chinese jurisdictional waters. Chinese law-enforcement ships were unable to budge Japan from the site, wrote Ryan Martinson, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, in 2015.
After that incident, as the first Zhaotou-class cutter was being built, it was celebrated in China as a ship that would intimidate neighbors.
“Not just small countries but even Japan will be in awe,” a Chinese shipbuilding journal declared.
Chinese coast guard ships sail in formation in the South China Sea. Photo: Wang Yuguo/Xinhua/Zuma Press
