China’s coast guard just like ours?

China coast guard ship No. 2101 sails in the East China Sea about 40 miles from the islands called Senkaku by Japan and Diaoyu by China on Wednesday. Chinese coast guard ships were spotted for the first time near the disputed islands controlled by Japan following a reorganization of the service in a bid to boost its effectiveness. (Associated Press photo provided by Japan’s 11th Regional Coast Guard)

The Chinese coast guard is in the news for straying near islands that are part of a territorial dispute between China and Japan, but if you have never seen the Chinese ships, you might have done a double-take.

The Chinese consolidated several of their maritime agencies and debuted their new coast guard Monday. If their ships look familiar, it’s probably because the Chinese have modeled their coast guard after the U.S.

In a June interview, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Bob Papp told the Navy Times that the Chinese were taking cues for their coast guard from his service.

“Most of them are white ships with various colored stripes on them, they’ve patterned themselves after the [U.S.] Coast Guard,” Papp said.

Papp said in the interview that the U.S. Coast Guard has developed a “reliable, trusted partnership,” with the Chinese fisheries agency. “We have been dealing with their maritime agencies for a long time,” Papp said. The Coast Guard held a joint search-and-rescue training exercise with the Chinese in Hawaii in 2012, and the service will be participating in talks with China and other countries at the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum later this year in Vladivostok, Russia. Those talks will include discussing the possibility of more joint training exercises with China.

So what do you think of the relationship between the U.S. Coast Guard and China and China’s move to consolidate its maritime agencies into a single one modeled after the U.S. Coast Guard? Leave your comments below.