The crew of a Taiwanese fishing boat has been detained after the boat was seized by the Chinese coast guard while it was operating near an island controlled by Taiwan.
Taiwan’s coast guard says the boat was intercepted by Chinese vessels Tuesday night near the Kinmen islands, located just a few kilometers off the southern Chinese coastal city of Xiamen.
It says it dispatched three patrol boats to assist the fishing boat, but they were blocked by three Chinese vessels. The Taiwanese boats demanded the Chinese vessels release the fishing boat and its crew, but said they were warned by the Chinese side not to interfere.
The Taiwanese coast guard says it ended its pursuit to avoid escalating the conflict.
The fishing boat was taken to a nearby Chinese fishing port. The five-person crew includes two Taiwanese nationals and three Indonesians.
Tuesday night’s incident was the latest maritime conflict between Taiwan and China this year.
Two Chinese fishermen drowned in February when their boat capsized as it was fleeing Taiwan’s coast guard after entering restricted waters near Kinmen.
China responded days later when its coast guard briefly boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat while it was on a sightseeing trip near Kinmen.
Taiwan has been self-governed since the end of China’s civil war in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces were driven off the mainland by Mao Zedong’s Communists.
But Beijing regards the island of 23 million and its outlying islands as Chinese territory and has been ramping up its threat to achieve that by military force if necessary.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.