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Taiwan has asked South Korea for assistance investigating a Chinese-owned ship suspected of cutting a subsea cable off its northern coast on Friday.
Taiwan telecoms operator Chunghwa Telecom and the Taiwan Coast Guard said on Saturday that the cargo vessel Shunxing39 was believed to have caused damage to a communications cable — close to the port of Keelung on Taiwan’s north coast — on the morning of January 3.
It follows incidents where Chinese ships came under scrutiny when fibre optic cables in the Baltic Sea were severed last November and a gas pipeline and cable were damaged there in October 2023.
The latest occurrence highlights the vulnerability of crucial offshore communications and energy infrastructure and the difficulties in prosecuting sabotage.
While the ship sails under Cameroon’s flag, Taiwan officials said it was owned by Jie Yang Trading Limited. The Hong Kong-registered company’s only listed director is Guo Wenjie, a mainland China citizen.
Chunghwa Telecom said data connections were immediately restored by rerouting data to other international subsea cables.
But Taipei is concerned that China could surreptitiously cut Taiwan’s external communications links in any potential attempt at annexing the country. Beijing claims sovereignty over the island and has threatened to seize it by force if necessary.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan government officials told the Financial Times the damaged cable is part of the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System. The subsea internet cable connecting Taiwan with the US west coast is owned by an international consortium. As well as Chunghwa, it includes the US operator AT&T, Japan’s NTT, Korea Telecom and Chinese operators China Telecom and China Unicom.
“Since it was not possible for us to question the captain, we have asked the South Korean authorities to help with the investigation at the ship’s next port of destination,” a Taiwan Coast Guard official said. A Taiwanese national security official said the ship was due to arrive in Pusan over the next few days.
Taiwan’s coastguard and other government officials said tracking data from the ship’s automatic identification system signal and satellite data showed that the Shunxing39 had dragged its anchor at the location where the cable was ruptured.
While a coastguard ship carried out an external inspection of the vessel and established radio contact with the captain, its officials could not board it due to rough weather, and it could not order its seizure for further investigation under international law, because too much time had passed since the incident, officials said.
“This is another case of a very worrying global trend of sabotage against subsea cables,” said a senior Taiwanese national security official. “The ships that are involved in these incidents are typically rundown vessels that have little above-the-board business. This one, too, is in very bad shape. It is similar to the ships that are part of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet,’” he added.
According to ship tracking data seen by the FT, the Shunxing39 had been criss-crossing waters close to Taiwan’s north coast since December 8 at least. The pattern suggested the cable damage was not an “innocent accident”, the official said.
Chinese commercial or fishing vessels have occasionally participated in some of the large military exercises Beijing regularly holds close to Taiwan. Taipei is concerned that such “greyzone” operations, below the threshold of war, will make it harder to defend against aggression that could eventually escalate to an outright attack.
Additional reporting by Chan Ho-him and Cheng Leng in Hong Kong