Taiwanese Battle Rampant Smuggling

Their cargoes range from the exotic to the erotic, from desperate job seekers to girls and guns. But a crackdown by Taiwan may dent smugglers’ multimillion-dollar business.

Fishing boats lurking in the waters off Taiwan smuggle enough wares to stock a bazaar, enough prostitutes to fill dozens of brothels and enough workers to staff many of the island’s labor-starved factories.

Security officials and analysts say watermelon seeds, rooster testicles (considered a delicacy), medicinal wines, peanuts, garlic, mushrooms, guns, girls, laborers and drugs are pouring into Taiwan from China, just a short boat ride away.

“Taiwan has about 150 fishing ports and each one can have several hundred fishing boats. There is no way of knowing how many smuggling cases we don’t catch,” said Jim C. H. Huang, inspector general of customs.

“It’s a fact that most fishermen at some point have smuggled. Because of pollution and other reasons, it’s hard to make a living just from fishing . . . so they do other activities.”

But Taiwan’s new premier, Hau Pei-tsun, formerly the country’s top general, has vowed to crack down on the smuggling business and has bolstered the anti-smuggling drive with 20,000 additional troops.

Nanliao Harbor, just up the coast from the northwestern port of Hsinchu and only 75 miles from China, has been declared a special military zone with strict control on entry and exit.

Everywhere else on Taiwan’s long coast soldiers equipped with rifles, radar, night-vision glasses, spotlights and dogs play a cat-and-mouse game with Taiwan fishing boats that approach the shore, drop off their cargo and speed away.

Analysts say the smuggling trade flourishes because Taiwan and China are still officially at war 41 years after the Nationalist Party fled to the island, formerly Formosa, in defeat from communist victory in China’s civil war.

Taiwan bans direct trade and investment in China, and while it tolerates indirect trade through third countries, especially Hong Kong, many businessmen want the convenience and economy of direct shipping back and forth across the Taiwan Strait.

Officials said the extent of the smuggling could be measured in the number of fishing boats ordered. At Nanliao Harbor the number of boats jumped from 80 to 200 in just one year, the economist said, despite a dying fishing industry.

With so many people profitably employed in smuggling, the new crackdown has not been universally welcomed.

When Nanliao was declared a military control zone, the Hsinchu City Council, which has jurisdiction over the harbor, canceled two days of meetings to protest being singled out.

“Up and down the coast more or less all harbors are involved in smuggling,” said council chairman Yang Chin-mu. “We received many telephone calls from citizens complaining about the inconvenience.”

Analysts say underworld gangs are entrenched in the smuggling business, running fleets of boats.

Smuggling guns from China is tremendously profitable because of demand from Taiwan’s organized crime gangs. In the first four months of 1990 police found 349 guns from China, compared to 687 in all of 1989. Many more go undiscovered.

A fishing boat operator can make a profit of $30,000 per trip.

But smuggling people can be equally lucrative.

A worker in China pays $500 to $700 to be smuggled into Taiwan, and a boat may take 50 or more per trip.

For anyone on the mainland that is a huge sum of money, but illegal immigrants can earn that in a month working in a Taiwan factory.

“The first words out of their mouth are always, ‘We came because it’s so easy to make money in Taiwan. Taiwan is so rich,’ ” said an army captain who heads a unit aimed at preventing illegal immigration.

Security forces said they knew of more than 2,000 illegal immigrants smuggled from China so far this year, twice the number they recorded in the whole of last year.