Under the cover of darkness, they began. In the early hours of October 24, 2019, two Chinese marine vessels, colossus Changxin 36, and the smaller and slower Fengyi 9969 encroached into Taiwan’s Exclusive Economic Zone, just east of the Taiwan Strait. A handful of crew hastily rigged up pumps and underwater pipelines to suction up slurries of sand and seawater from the shallow coasts of Penghu Island.

At 6AM, the sand looters were intercepted. The Penghu 8th Division Coast Guard arrived in six naval patrol vessels plus helicopter backup, ambushing them on all sides. Sirens wailed as 28 people were arrested on their own ships that night – a new record for the local county court.

Yet this was no isolated case. Although such illicit sand mining decreased during the recent COVID-19 outbreak, in May 2020, according to local tip-offs, dozens of sand-pumping vessels once again approached Penghu’s shoreline. Coast Guard Administration (CGA) patrollers quickly commandeered one, ordering the pirates to pour the sand bounty back into the sea, shouting “you will not take a single gram.”

Taiwan takes a hard line on such trespassing, fending off over a thousand Chinese sand-pumping vessels from January to April of this year alone. The CGA says illegal sand pumping from China has occurred since at least the beginning of the millennium – a problem initially on Kinmen Island which has now gone further out to sea.