At 5 o'clock in the morning in the Pacific Ocean, the waves are beating against the black rocks on the east coast. The morning fog off the coast of Hualien has not yet dissipated. On the radar screen of the coast guard patrol boat, a light spot without the Automatic Identification System (AIS) turned on quietly appeared. That is a 10,000-ton patrol ship of the China Coast Guard. There were no flags raised, no missiles fired, and even the responses to the eviction broadcast were polite. However, the ship, painted with simplified Chinese characters, was cutting into the contiguous area in eastern Taiwan at a speed of 12 knots per hour.
The first time, the Chinese people were nervous and the TV news was on the rotation; the second time, the political parties were attacking and defending, and the foreign media followed up; by the 30th time, the society was gradually losing its voice. The most common response we hear is an understatement of "here we go again."
This sentence "Here we go again" is exactly the answer China wants to hear most.
In the past, Chinese people used to simplify the situation in the Taiwan Strait into a black and white binary opposition: either peace or war. But the reality is that Beijing has already crossed this line and opened up a third battlefield called the "grey zone."
Coast guard ships claim to be "normalized law enforcement," scientific research ships claim to be "undersea exploration," and official ships claim to be "resource management." Without having to pull the trigger, they can shuttle through the waters surrounding Taiwan, testing the response speed of the maritime patrol, the military's control links, and the limits of Taiwanese society's tolerance for threats. This paralyzing tactic of "three steps forward, two steps back" is essentially a war against Taiwan's national will and habits. When "threats" become accustomed to "routine," cracks have appeared in Taiwan's psychological defense line against sovereign jurisdiction.
Faced with this kind of sausage-slicing aggression, we cannot regard maritime threats as just "field operations" of the Coast Guard, but must elevate them to the overall level of national security and establish a comprehensive maritime resilience system:
■ Maritime and air joint defense and the extension of unmanned technology: The front line consists of maritime patrol law enforcement and navy long-distance surveillance, and the comprehensive introduction of domestic unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned vehicles (USVs), coupled with a low-orbit satellite system, to build a "Taiwan Maritime Situational Awareness Network" (MDA) with no blind spots, so that any illegal ships trying to obliterate maritime boundaries will have no way to hide.
■ Inter-departmental dynamic response mechanism: Integrate the Coast Guard, the Ministry of National Defense, the Fisheries Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Department of Digital Development to establish a second-level intelligence sharing and threat level interpretation platform. In the event of gray emergencies such as forced check-in or civil aviation interference, the division of power and responsibilities can be accurately initiated and the enemy will never be able to turn it into an "internal law enforcement".
■ Civilian and international maritime intelligence networking: Combining real-time intelligence reports from local offshore fishing and scientific research vessels, and establishing gray area intelligence links with countries with similar concepts such as the United States and Japan, elevating simple "regional conflicts" to "security consensus on the global democratic supply chain."
Real peace is by no means based on the illusion of compromise with the invaders, nor is it based on the hope that the sea will always be calm. The "dynamic peace" that Taiwan pursues is that when hostile forces test the bottom line again and again, we can still demonstrate national sovereignty calmly, firmly and institutionally.
The war may not have begun yet, but Taiwan's maritime defense line to protect freedom has been unfolding in the waves of every morning. We will never let "habits" become the beginning of our loss. Only by facing the shadows of gray with unshakable oceanic resilience can Taiwan's democratic light stand forever on this ocean.
