Maybe not in perfect harmony, but in tune enough to cooperate in a rescue. Al Jazeera reports that Taiwan and China have been “conducting a joint rescue mission to find two missing crew members after a fishing vessel capsized near Taiwan’s Kinmen islands” (March 14, 2024).
The boat carrying six people sank about 1.07 nautical miles (about 2 km) southwest of the island chain’s Dongding islet at about 6am on Thursday (22:00 GMT on Wednesday), according to authorities in Taiwan.
Two people have been confirmed dead and two were rescued.
The area is sensitive because Kinmen is located just 5km (three miles) off China’s eastern coast.
The joint operation, which includes six Chinese rescue ships, comes a month to the day after the Taiwanese coastguard’s pursuit of a Chinese fishing boat in the area left two men dead, and added to the tensions between Taipei and Beijing.
Taiwan coast guard chief Chou Mei-wu says that Chinese requests for help are common and that over the past three years some 119 persons have been saved by similar rescue efforts. He says: “The waters are narrow around the Kinmen-Xiamen [area] and cooperation between Taiwan and China is very important.”
Iffy prospects
What effect does this kind of cooperation, as well as any cross-strait trade and visits of Taiwanese to the mainland and mainlanders to Taiwan and other manifestations of seemingly noncombative and serene cohabitation, have on the prospects for peace between China and Taiwan?
No effect. The prospects depend entirely on the attitude of the Chinese state, which, Al Jazeera observes, under Dictator Xi Jinping “has in recent years ramped up rhetoric of unifying China and Taiwan, while the Chinese military has stepped up pressure on the island by deploying warplanes and naval vessels around it on a near-daily basis.”
Chinese Communist Party officials would say that the prospects depend entirely on the attitude of Taiwan, which could stop saying things that sound like “separatism” (i.e., imply that Taiwan is a separate country or, in the Chinese government’s wrongheaded view, that it aspires to become one) and which could surrender without any fuss or muss to China’s desire to “reunify” with Taiwan. It is true enough that one reason wars happen is that the side invited to submit peaceably to conquest and subjugation declines the invitation.
Not a foreign affair
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has apparently not been alerted to any uptick in comity between China and Taiwan. His press conference of March 14, 2024 included this exchange:
Reuters: Taiwan dispatched coast guard boats today to rescue a capsized fishing vessel from the mainland near Kinmen. Can you confirm this and provide more details?
Wang Wenbin: It’s not related to foreign affairs. I’d refer you to competent authorities.
Wang seems to be intimating that the reporter’s question is not about foreign affairs because Taiwan is, always has been, a part of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government’s standard line in resolute indifference to all evidence to the contrary. I can’t be sure that this is his point, since the ministry does often talk about Taiwan. If it is a jab, it is so subtle that no one except everyone in Taiwan and China would understand.
