YANCHENG, Apr.16 -- Recently, fishermen living in southeastern China’s coastal cities have frequently reported the capture of unidentified objects strange in shape while fishing at sea, which were actually foreign devices with spying functions according to relevant departments.
In one case, a fisherman in Yancheng, a coastal cityof Jiangsu Province, caught a huge black object in the coastal waters of China. Equipped with advanced solar panels and a propeller at one end, the captured object looked like a boat with a length of three meters as a whole.
The object was an advanced unmanned marine vehicle (UMV) with good directional control underwater, powered by the undulate of waves with sensors mounted on it gathering data, as appraised by experts. Being a wave glider not made in China, it was considered to have been covertly launched in offshore waters of China by another country.
In recent years, similar spy devices have been scattered, as can be seen, in waters off various provinces and cities of eastern China, especially in China’s Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangxi, and Hainan Provinces, large in number and diverse in model and size. Generally speaking, these spy devices focused on collecting information on hydrologic characteristics of the sea and marine information closely related to military activities, which has posed a threat to the secrecy of China’s underwater targets since these data might expose the whereabouts of submarines. Moreover, judging from a probabilistic analysis, there are still many spy devices of the sort yet to be discovered, and efforts to strengthen maritime security in China still have a long way to go.
State security organs have issued a variety of incentive policies to encourage people anywhere to report discovery actively and provide clues. Since 2016, a number of overseas spy devices have been seized in coastal areas, and 91 fishermen and related personnel have been rewarded for their great contribution to safeguarding China’s national security.