100 China boats seen encroaching in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR – About 100 Chinese-registered boats have been detected encroaching in Malaysian waters near the Luconia Shoals in the South China Sea, a Malaysian minister said.

Shahidan Kassim, a minister in charge of national security, said the government has dispatched the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency and the navy to the area to monitor the situation.

Shahidan was quoted by the national Bernama news agency on Friday as saying that legal enforcement action would be taken if the Chinese vessels are found to have entered Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that Chinese boats have a right to be in the waters.

“I want to point out that it is the fishing season in the South China Sea now, and according to usual practice, Chinese fishing vessels are fishing normally in the relevant waters at this time each year,” Hong said.

Japan opens radar station

Japan yesterday switched on a radar station in the East China Sea, giving it a permanent intelligence gathering post close to Taiwan and a group of islands disputed by Japan and China, drawing an angry response from Beijing.

The new Self Defense Force base on the island of Yonaguni is at the western extreme of a string of Japanese islands in the East China Sea, 150 kilometers south of the disputed islands known as the Senkaku islands in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.

China has raised concerns with its neighbors and in the West with its assertive claim to most of the South China Sea where the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims. Japan has long been mired in a territorial dispute with China over the East China Sea islands.

“Until yesterday, there was no coastal observation unit west of the main Okinawa island. It was a vacuum we needed to fill,” said Daigo Shiomitsu, a Ground Self Defense Force lieutenant colonel who commands the new base on Yonaguni. “It means we can keep watch on territory surrounding Japan and respond to all situations.”

Taiwan arrests 41 poachers

The Taiwanese coast guard said yesterday it had arrested 41 Chinese fishermen in possession of 15 tons of illicit coral reef and endangered turtles near a disputed atoll in the South China Sea.

Taiwanese authorities detained the fishermen on March 22 after their vessel was discovered operating illegally off the shore of Tongsha island, the coast guard said, in the island’s largest mission targeting rampant poaching in the contested waters. 

Officials later recovered the harvested reef from the ship along with three endangered turtles and about 40 kilograms of chemicals used to kill fish.

“The damage they caused to the Tongsha ecological system is hard to estimate,” Allen Chen, a research fellow at Taiwan’s Biodiversity Research Center, told AFP.

“The Chinese ship would have earned a large fortune if they could have sped away with the huge amount of valuable reef and sold it at home,” he said, adding that Chinese demand for coral has surged in tandem with its continued economic development.