Speaker: Po-Chang (Paul) Huang, Fairbank Center Visiting Scholar; Research Fellow, Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation

Discussant: Steven Goldstein, Director, Taiwan Studies Workshop, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

On February 14, 2024, a tiny Chinese fishing raft collided with a Taiwan Coast boat near the waters of Kinmen, a Taiwan-controlled island just miles off China’s Fujian coast. Two Chinese fishermen drowned as a result, and a huge Chinese public outrage against Taiwan ensued. In the months that followed Chinese Coast Guard started regular incursions into Taiwan’s declared “restricted waters” around Kinmen which effectively nullified the unspoken boundaries that have been maintained for decades across the two sides.

Paul Huang, a Taiwanese security researcher and a visiting fellow at the Fairbank Center, will discuss this underreported crisis and why its risks at hand are far greater than most realized. While Western observers dismissed it as a small fishing incident, Huang argues the events since February point clearly to Chinese government’s calculated escalation that have been unprecedented in recent history of cross-strait relations. Instead of backing down quietly as Taiwan government assumed, Beijing seems determined to use this as a steppingstone for a much larger use-of-force operation against Taiwan, which will be of grave consequences to both sides of the strait.