China Coast Guard (CCG) has recently deployed and conducted Operation National Sword 2021, aiming to crack down on maritime smuggling. This special operation has not only continued to crack down on smuggling of the key tax-related products such as refined oil products, cigarettes, mineral products, sugar and cereals, foreign junk, wildlife, wildlife products, goods related to guns and drugs, but also specially strengthened the punishment for smuggling cold chain food such as frozen food products and frozen seafood, epidemic prevention materials and vaccines into China. CCG conducts various ad-hoc tasks aiming to crack down on maritime smuggling while it spares no effort to carry out the normalized pandemic prevention and control.

Cracking down on smuggling is related to national security and the people’s welfare. The crime of smuggling not only severely impacts the domestic market, causes the national tax revenue to rapidly decrease and deranges the national economic order, but also severely threatens the ecological resources and environment, and the people’s lives and properties. At present, the pandemic is prevalent overseas while it is well-controlled at home. Therefore, in such a special situation, smuggling frozen food products, frozen seafood and other products that have not passed the inspection, quarantine and nucleic acid test into China may bring the novel corona viruses to China and may lead to pandemic outbreaks in some places of China. Recent researches have shown that all the novel corona viruses that have infected people in China since April 2020 are from overseas. Besides, smuggling foreign junk into China will severely ruin the environment and harm the ecology; smuggling frozen food products into China may bring infectious diseases such as African swine fever, avian flu, foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease to China and severely threaten the people’s life security.  

CCG will strictly follow the deployment of Operation National Sword 2021, vigorously carry out the patrol, management and control on the key waters, conduct close cooperation with other organizations in the law enforcement, strengthen the deep strike and ensure that the special operation will achieve good results. All the people are encouraged to dial the maritime calling service platform 95110 and report clues about crimes of maritime smuggling.