Taiwan chases off 16 Chinese ships, calls coordinated pressure 'hybrid warfare'

Taiwan's coast guard said it drove away 16 Chinese vessels that were operating at the same time around Taiwan's main island and the outlying Pratas islands, describing the moves as "hybrid warfare" and "maritime harassment," Al Jazeera reported on Sunday. The group included Chinese coast guard ships, research vessels and fishing boats, four of them in the last category, and some of the ships reportedly entered waters that Taiwan treats as restricted.

The coast guard called the number of Chinese ships involved "unusually large" and said it had acted immediately to neutralize what it described as threats. It accused Beijing of "attempting to unilaterally alter the status quo" and of trying to create a "false impression of jurisdiction" over the waters around the island. The report did not include a response from Chinese authorities.

A steep rise in vessel numbers

The episode fits a pattern of rising maritime activity that Taipei has been documenting for months. According to Taiwanese data cited by Al Jazeera, China deployed a record 244 coast guard, research and other ships around Taiwan's main island in July 2026, compared with 58 in the same month a year earlier. In the first 21 days of August, Taiwan detected 152 such vessels. The figures point to a sustained increase in the use of nonmilitary and paramilitary ships rather than a single spike tied to one event.

Pratas, known in Chinese as Dongsha, has become a recurring flashpoint. On Oct. 1, Taiwan's coast guard fired a water cannon at a Chinese recreational fishing vessel near the islands. The small atoll group lies in the northern South China Sea, between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland coast near Hong Kong, far from Taiwan's main island.

Competing claims at sea

Beijing claims both Taiwan and Pratas as Chinese territory and asserts jurisdiction over the waters around them, a position Taipei rejects. That dispute is what gives routine-looking deployments of coast guard and survey ships their political weight. Each patrol that goes unchallenged can be presented as an exercise of law enforcement authority, while each interception allows Taipei to insist that the waters are under its control. The mix of vessels is also significant: research ships can gather data on the seabed and currents, fishing boats blur the line between civilian and state activity, and coast guard cutters carry the authority of a law enforcement agency rather than a navy.

Taipei's description of the latest episode as hybrid warfare reflects that ambiguity. By labeling coordinated operations by civilian and paramilitary ships as a form of warfare, Taiwan is seeking to frame activity that falls below the threshold of armed conflict as a security threat that warrants a forceful response and international attention.

What it means: The confrontation underlines how Beijing's pressure on Taiwan is increasingly carried out by ships that are not warships. A fourfold-plus jump in deployments around the main island between July 2025 and July 2026, combined with simultaneous action near Pratas, suggests a deliberate effort to normalize Chinese presence and test Taiwan's capacity to respond on several fronts at once. For Taipei, the challenge is to push back without escalating; for regional shipping and neighbors such as Japan and the Philippines, the risk is that gray-zone friction in busy waters produces an incident that neither side planned.