US Coast Guard renegotiating deal with China for joint enforcement, even as it bulks up presence in western Pacific

The USCG is looking to revive a lapsed agreement with the Chinese Coast Guard to conduct operations such as cracking down on illegal fishing

It is simultaneously deploying more American-flagged cutters to the region, though it has ruled out sending them to the South China Sea for now

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A US coastguard cutter’s crew trains in the Pacific Ocean in September. Photo: Handout/US Coast Guard

Published: 12:00am, 3 Aug 2021Updated: 3:21pm, 3 Aug 2021

The United States Coast Guard (USCG) is renegotiating a lapsed agreement with its Chinese counterpart to jointly conduct law enforcement operations at sea, even as it deploys more American-flagged cutters to the western Pacific in light of China’s growing naval capabilities.

Admiral Karl Schultz, the USCG’s commandant, last week told a press briefing that the once cooperative and amicable partnership between the two coastguards to go after illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing had lapsed for “over a year now”.

“We had a shiprider memorandum agreement with the Chinese over the years [covering the North Pacific]. We’re at the table renegotiating that MOU today,” he said.

Under a shiprider agreement with the US, a country’s authorities can board USCG vessels while they are on patrol, or vice versa. The country’s authorities can also authorise the USCG to take action on their behalf.

Over more than 20 years, there had been 109 Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) officers who were shipriders aboard USCG cutters, and they helped seize 21 vessels that were engaged in illegal drift-net fishing in the North Pacific waters, Zhao Jian, deputy director of CCG’s international cooperation office, told the 2018 Asean Regional Forum in Brisbane.

But amid deteriorating bilateral ties, the USCG last year singled out the CCG as the “main perpetrator of global IUU fishing because it has the largest distant-water fishing fleet in the world, estimated at nearly 17,000 vessels”.

In a December paper, Chinese researcher Yan Yan suggested that this accusation was “an attempt to create a conducive atmosphere for the USCG to take actions against China”. The US had since 2019 sent USCG vessels to the South China Sea to counter China’s “grey zone” tactics, said the director of the Research Center of Oceans Law and Policy in the National Institute for the South China Sea Studies (NISCSS).