Taiwan is investigating whether a China-linked ship was responsible for damaging one of the undersea cables that connect Taiwan to the Internet, the latest reminder that Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to damage from China.
The incident occurred as Europe is concerned about acts of sabotage, including those aimed at undersea communication lines. Two fiber-optic cables under the Baltic Sea were cut in November, prompting officials in Sweden, Finland and Lithuania to ground a Chinese-flagged merchant vessel in the area for weeks because of its possible involvement.
In Taiwan, communications were restored immediately after the damage was discovered, and there were no major outages. The island’s main telecommunications provider, Chunghwa Telecom, received notice on Friday morning that the cable, known as the Trans-Pacific Express Cable, had been damaged. That cable also connects South Korea, Japan, China and the United States.
That afternoon, the Taiwan Coast Guard blockaded a cargo ship from the northern city of Keelung, near the twenty-two cable crossings. The ship belonged to a Hong Kong company and had seven Chinese crew members, the Taiwan Coast Guard Administration said.
The damaged cable is one of more than a dozen that help keep Taiwan online. These fragile ropes are easy to break anchors that are dragged to the bottom of the sea by many ships in the busy waters around Taiwan.
Analysts and officials say that while it is difficult to prove whether the damage to the cables was intentional, such an act would fit into China’s pattern of intimidation and psychological warfare aimed at weakening Taiwan’s defenses.
Taiwan said the cargo ship it intercepted was registered under the flags of Cameroon and Tanzania. “The possibility that a Chinese-flagged vessel is involved in a gray area violation cannot be ruled out,” the Coast Guard Administration said Monday in a statement.
Such harassment, which distracts Taiwan’s forces but prevents open conflict, has a debilitating effect in the long run, according to Yisuo Tzeng, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense. That puts Taiwan at risk of being caught off guard in the event of a real conflict, Mr Tzeng said.
Taiwan experiences daily incursions into its waters and airspace by the People’s Liberation Army. Last month, China sent nearly 90 coast guard ships to waters in the area, its largest operation in nearly three decades.
China has also deployed armed fishing boats and its coast guard vessels to disputes around the South China Sea region, and increased patrols just a few kilometers off the coast of Taiwan’s outer islands, increasing the risk of a deadly conflict.
Such abuses “have been a defining feature of Chinese coercion in Taiwan for decades, but in the last few years it has really increased,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
And in cases like this and the recent damage to the cables under the Baltic Sea, it is difficult for the authorities to measure their response when the true identity of the ship cannot be confirmed.
“Do you send a Coast Guard ship every time there’s an illegal sand dredger or, in this case, a light-flag ship with Chinese connections damaging a submarine cable?” asked Mr. Poling.
Ship tracking data and shipping records analyzed by The Times show that the ship may have been broadcasting its locations under a false name.
Taiwan said the ship was seen using two sets of Automatic Identification System devices, which are used to broadcast the ship’s location. On Jan. 3, when Taiwan said the cable was damaged, the vessel Shun Xing 39 was reporting its AIS positions in waters off the northeast coast of Taiwan.
About nine hours later, at about 4:51 pm local time, Shun Xing 39 stopped transmitting location data. That was after the Taiwan Coast Guard said they had found the vessel and asked it to return to the waters outside Keelung Harbor for an investigation.
One minute later, and about 50 meters away, the vessel Xing Shun 39, which had not reported its position since late December, began broadcasting the signal, according to William Conroy, a marine analyst in Wildwood, Mo., with Semaphore Maritime Solutions. who analyzed the AIS data at the Starboard vessel tracking station.
On the vessel tracking website, both Xing Shun 39 and Shun Xing 39 describe themselves as cargo vessels with a class A AIS transponder. Generally, a cargo ship equipped with this class of transponder will be large enough to require registration with the International Maritime Organization and receive a unique identification number known as an IMO number. The Xing Shun 39 has an IMO number, but the Shun Xing 39 does not appear on the IMO database. This suggests that “Xing Shun 39” is the real identity of the ship and “Shun Xing 39” is not true, according to Mr. Conroy.
The Taiwan Coast Guard publicly identified the vessel as the Shun Xing 39, and said the vessel used two AIS systems.
Ship and company records show that Jie Yang Trading Ltd, a Hong Kong-based company, took over as the owner of the Xing Shun 39 in April 2024.
The waves were too big to board the cargo ship for further investigation, the Taiwan Coast Guard Administration said. Taiwan is seeking help from South Korea because the cargo ship’s crew said it was headed for that country, officials said.
In 2023, the outer Matsu Islands, off the coast of China, endured an internet blackout for months after two undersea internet cables broke. These fiber optic cables that connect Taiwan to the Internet have experienced about 30 such breaks between 2017 and 2023.
The frequent outages are a reminder that Taiwan’s telecommunications infrastructure must be resilient.
To help ensure that Taiwan can stay online if the cables fail, the government has been seeking backup, including building a network of low-Earth orbit satellites that can beam Internet to Earth from space. Most importantly, Taiwanese officials are rushing to build their system without the involvement of Elon Musk, whose rocket company, SpaceX, dominates the satellite internet industry, but whose deep business links to China have left them wary.
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