Cooperation across the Taiwan Strait can deliver real benefits while confrontation continues. Publicly testing specific commitments would help Taiwan preserve useful engagement, recognise its limits and decide when to expand it.
On 14 March 2024, Taiwan sent coastguard vessels to join a search for missing Chinese fishermen near Kinmen, the Taiwan-administered islands close to China’s coast. Chinese authorities had requested help after a fishing boat capsized. Two days later, Taiwan’s coastguard reported a different encounter: four Chinese coastguard ships entered waters Taipei designates as restricted and stayed for just over an hour after being asked to leave.
These episodes capture a difficulty at the heart of cross-Strait relations. The unresolved political dispute between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, whose government retains the name Republic of China, plays out in waters where practical cooperation is also necessary. Joining a rescue showed that while officials could work together on a specific task, it did not establish restraint in other encounters. While this does not mean that the subsequent confrontation made searching for the fishermen any less worthwhile. It does, however, highlight a critical point of tension in how cross-Strait engagements are interpreted.
Taiwan needs a way to judge engagement that preserves this distinction. An initiative’s sponsors could declare what they expect it to achieve, publish evidence of its operation and submit further commitments to review. Such democratic verification would also give voters and legislators a basis for assessing claims of progress. It would allow useful cooperation to continue without requiring the public to treat it as proof of a wider rapprochement.
Turn Claims into Trials
The history of official communications explains why promises need testing. A ministerial hotline opened in December 2015. By June 2016, Beijing confirmed that the principal cross-Strait liaison and negotiation mechanisms had stopped following Taiwan’s change of administration, citing disagreement over the political basis for relations. Establishing a channel had not insulated it from the dispute it was supposed to help manage. Its practical value depended on whether someone would answer.
A modest next step could be a six-month trial of agreed maritime emergency notifications. Building on the rescue cooperation seen around Kinmen, designated officials would exchange the location, time and assistance required after specified accidents. Both sides would need to agree on which incidents qualified and how quickly to acknowledge messages. The trial would come up for public review after six months. Beijing’s participation does not need to be assumed.
The review would examine qualifying incidents, notifications, unanswered requests and assistance delivered. Scheduled test messages could reveal whether the channel was staffed when no emergency occurred; they could not prove it would work in a crisis. This would give an initiative’s sponsors something more substantial than a channel’s existence on which to base a claim of success.
Taiwan could publish its own objectives and results even without agreement on joint reporting. The Mainland Affairs Council, which coordinates cross-Strait policy, could maintain a register stating each initiative’s obligations, review date and evidence for renewal. Sensitive operational details would remain protected, while legislators and outside specialists could question the conclusions.
There is a domestic reason to make that scrutiny possible before commitments expand. An August 2014 Legislative Yuan research report identified inadequate negotiating transparency around the cross-Strait services trade agreement as an obstacle to public and industry consensus. Publication cannot resolve disagreement over an agreement’s merits. But it can let people examine its terms before being asked to accept the negotiators’ assessment.
Measure Pressure Across Domains
The Kinmen episodes also explain why an emergency channel’s performance needs to be assessed separately from wider security conditions. Answered calls would demonstrate communication. A claim that engagement had reduced coercion would require evidence about military operations, coastguard encounters and economic restrictions as well. However, as previously noted, a successful rescue cannot cancel out a dangerous encounter elsewhere.
Even apparently straightforward counts require care. The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative examined vessel-position transmissions around Kinmen and Matsu from May 2020 to September 2024. It found an average of 13 recorded Chinese coastguard entries per week in 2024 into waters Taiwan designates restricted or prohibited: more than three times the 2022 level, but only slightly above the 2020 average of 11. The choice of starting point changed the apparent scale of the increase. Gaps in transmissions also meant these were minimum observed counts.
That finding supports publishing the baseline and missing data alongside any assessment. Reviewers would need to consider where vessels operated and what they did, as well as how many appeared. Fewer recorded entries would be inconclusive if surveillance coverage had fallen or activity had shifted elsewhere. Even a sustained improvement would require examination of other explanations before being attributed to engagement.
Australian researchers can contribute to this work. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s 2025 Pressure Points project combines open-source data, imagery and government reporting to examine activity around Taiwan. Such work offers evidence against which official claims can be checked. External analysis remains open to challenge; decisions about the terms of engagement belong to Taiwan’s democratic institutions.
Keep Engagement Reversible
Review becomes consequential when Taiwan can limit or revise the additional commitments it makes. This is what reversibility means here. An expiry clause alone does not guarantee it: commercial dependence or information already disclosed can outlast an arrangement.
The withdrawal of trade preferences illustrates the problem. In May 2024, Beijing announced that it would suspend tariff concessions on 134 categories of Taiwanese goods under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement from 15 June. Taiwan’s economic ministry outlined measures to help affected firms diversify markets and upgrade production. Tariff treatment can change at short notice, while firms may need time and resources to adapt. Assessing a bargain therefore includes the costs of interruption.
For a maritime trial, limiting those costs would mean sharing incident-specific rescue information without opening routine access to sensitive operational records. Before any expansion, officials could explain what new resources or information it required, what would happen if cooperation stopped, and which obligations could actually be unwound. A review could then support renewal, narrower terms or withdrawal from the additional commitments.
Withdrawal need not mean abandoning useful contact. In June 2016, when the ministerial hotline was inactive, officials reported that communication under the cross-Strait crime-fighting agreement continued. The interruption of one channel had not automatically closed another. The later Kinmen rescue likewise demonstrates the scope for practical assistance amid tension.
A new trial’s review provisions could preserve emergency contact and humanitarian assistance even if broader commitments were not renewed. The result would be a more discriminating approach to engagement. Taiwan could recognise cooperation that works, scrutinise larger claims made in its name and retain the capacity to change course. The fishermen near Kinmen were reason enough to cooperate. What that cooperation proved about the wider relationship was a separate question, requiring its own evidence.
Percy Yixuanchen Yu is the inaugural Visiting Research Fellow at Nanjing University’s School of International Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the Huazhi Global Governance Institute. His work examines cross-Strait relations, democratic legitimacy and the institutions of strategic restraint.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
