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Taiwan asked South Korea on Friday to help it investigate a Chinese ship suspected of cutting an undersea cable off its northern coast.
Taiwanese telecommunications operator Chunghwa Telecom and the Taiwan Coast Guard said on Saturday that the cargo ship Shunxing39 may have caused damage to a communications cable – near the port of Keelung on Taiwan’s northern coast – on the morning of January 3 .
This follows incidents in which Chinese ships were monitored when fiber optic cables were installed in the Baltic Sea. were separated last November and a gas pipeline and a cable were damaged there in October 2023.
The latest event highlights the vulnerability of crucial offshore communications and energy infrastructure and the difficulties of continuing sabotage.
Although the ship sails under the Cameroonian flag, Taiwanese officials said it was owned by Jie Yang Trading Limited. The only listed director of the Hong Kong-registered company is Guo Wenjie, a mainland Chinese citizen.
Chunghwa Telecom said data connections were immediately restored by rerouting data to other international submarine cables.
But Taipei fears China could surreptitiously cut off Taiwan’s external communications links in a possible attempt to annex the country. Beijing claims sovereignty over the island and has threatened to seize it by force if necessary.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan government officials told the Financial Times that the damaged cable was part of the Trans-Pacific Express cable system. The underwater internet cable connecting Taiwan to the US west coast is owned by an international consortium. In addition to Chunghwa, it includes the American operator AT&T, the Japanese NTT, Korea Telecom and the Chinese operators China Telecom and China Unicom.
“Since it was not possible for us to question the captain, we asked South Korean authorities to help us with the investigation at the ship’s next port of destination,” a Taiwanese coast guard official said. A Taiwanese national security official said the ship was expected to arrive in Pusan in the coming days.
The Taiwan Coast Guard and other government officials said signal tracking data from the ship’s automatic identification system and satellite data showed the Shunxing39 had dragged its anchor to where the cable had been broken.
While a coast guard vessel carried out an external inspection of the vessel and established radio contact with the captain, its officers could not board due to bad weather, nor could they order its seizure for a further investigation under international law because too much time had passed. passed since the incident, officials said.
“This is another case in a very worrying global trend of sabotage against undersea cables,” a senior Taiwanese national security official said. “The vessels involved in these incidents are generally dilapidated vessels that have little commercial activity. This one too is in very poor condition. It is similar to the ships that are part of the Russian ‘ghost fleet,’ he added.
According to ship tracking data seen by the FT, the Shunxing39 had been plying the waters near Taiwan’s northern coast since at least December 8. The diagram suggests the cable damage was not an “innocent accident,” the official said.
Chinese commercial or fishing vessels have sometimes participated in some of the large military exercises that Beijing regularly organizes near Taiwan. Taipei fears that such operations in the “gray zone,” below the war threshold, will make it more difficult to defend against aggression that could eventually escalate into outright attack.
Additional reporting by Chan Ho-him and Cheng Leng in Hong Kong
