Sometimes, brightly colored lights visible in the night sky can make for a stunning experience. The phenomenon of aurora borealis and aurora australis are the best-known examples of this, but there’s also something that’s cropped up more recently with a very different origin. A recent article in The Washington Post describes the situation in Taiwan’s Matsu Islands with evocative language: “an eerie, fluorescent glow fills the night sky,” write Alicia Chen and Lily Kuo. That glow is green in color — but it’s not due to solar winds or environmental phenomenon.
Instead, Chen and Kuo report, the green glow comes from LEDs used in squid fishing. That, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily alarming. What has the residents of the islands more concerned, then, is who it is doing the fishing and where they’re doing it. The Post‘s article explains that the fishing boats hail from the People’s Republic of China, and they’ve positioned themselves on one side of the median line that divides the People’s Republic of China from Taiwan.
This isn’t the first time that squid fishing has been used as an arm of geopolitical policy. In 2020, The New York Times reported that Chinese boats had engaged in clandestine squid fishing in North Korean waters.
As for the situation off the coast of Taiwan, many residents of the islands told the Post that they were concerned that it was intended as a show of force. Lai Wen-Chi, the head of the Fisheries and Husbandry Section of the county government, told the Post, “It used to be just one or two dots of green, but now you see a complete line of green.”
At least one fisherman the Post spoke argued that there’s a less ominous reason: the fishing is simply better near the median line. But at a time when tensions in the region run high, it’s not hard to see how anything could become politically charged to an unnerving extent.
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