China Coast Guard promoting international cooperation

The China Coast Guard has been promoting international cooperation by holding bilateral meetings and conducting joint patrols with neighboring countries, including South Korea, and Vietnam, a senior official said on Friday.

"In 2022, we successfully held high-level meetings with coast guard officials from South Korea and Vietnam separately, and we renewed the memorandum of cooperation with the South Korea Coast Guard," Zhao Xuexiang, deputy chief of the China Coast Guard, said at a Friday news conference reviewing the agency's work last year.

The coast guard also carried out joint patrols in 2022 with the South Korean maritime law enforcement department and conducted joint patrols in the Beibu Gulf with the Vietnam Coast Guard, he said, adding that they organized vessels to carry out fishery patrols in the North Pacific.

The official highlighted a multilateral meeting hosted by the Vietnam Coast Guard in December in which senior China Coast Guard officials held bilateral talks with their counterparts from Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

"We had fruitful talks with the law enforcement agencies of those countries, which laid the foundation for further cooperation with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, deepened mutual understanding and enhanced our friendship," Zhao said.

"This year, as the COVID-19 pandemic situation has eased, we will focus on more offline activities to consolidate existing bilateral and multilateral mechanisms and expand new external cooperation," he said.