Taiwan seeks help from South Korea over Chinese ship after submarine cable damaged
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Taiwan has asked South Korea for assistance in investigating a Chinese ship suspected of cutting a submarine cable off its northern coast on Friday.
Taiwan telecommunications operator Chunghwa Telecom and the Taiwan Coast Guard said on Saturday that the cargo ship Shunxing39 is believed to have damaged a communications cable on the morning of Jan. 3 near Keelung Port on Taiwan’s northern coast.
It follows incidents in which Chinese ships came under scrutiny over fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea were separated last November and a gas pipeline and cable were damaged there in October 2023.
The latest incident highlights the vulnerability of key offshore communications and energy infrastructure and the difficulties in prosecuting sabotage.
While the ship sails under the Cameroon flag, Taiwanese officials said it is owned by Jie Yang Trading Limited. The only listed director of the Hong Kong-registered company is Guo Wenjie, a citizen of mainland China.
Chunghwa Telecom said data connections were immediately restored by rerouting data to other international submarine cables.
But Taipei fears China could secretly cut Taiwan’s external communications links in a possible attempt to annex the country. Beijing claims sovereignty over the island and threatens to conquer 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 undersea internet cable connecting Taiwan to the West Coast of the United States is owned by an international consortium. In addition to Chunghwa, these include the US operator AT&T, the Japanese NTT, Korea Telecom and the Chinese operators China Telecom and China Unicom.
“As we were unable to interview the captain, we asked South Korean authorities to assist in the investigation at the ship’s next destination port,” a Taiwanese coast guard official said. A Taiwanese national security official said the ship would arrive in Pusan in the next few days.
Taiwan’s coast guard and other government officials said tracking data from the ship’s automatic identification system signal and satellite data showed the Shunxing39 pulled its anchor at the point where the cable broke.
While a Coast Guard vessel conducted an external inspection of the vessel and established radio contact with the captain, its officials were unable to board the vessel due to inclement weather, and it could not order its seizure for further investigation under international law because of too much time It has been elapsed since the incident, officials said.
“This is another case of a very worrying global trend of sabotage against submarine cables,” a senior Taiwanese national security official said. “The ships involved in these incidents are typically run-down vessels that do little beyond shipboard operations. This is also in very bad condition. “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 crisscrossing waters near Taiwan’s northern coast since at least December 8. The pattern suggested the cable damage was not an “innocent accident,” the official said.
Chinese commercial or fishing vessels have occasionally taken part in some of the large military exercises Beijing regularly holds near Taiwan. Taipei fears that such “gray zone” operations below the war line make it difficult to defend against aggression that could eventually escalate into an outright attack.
Additional reporting by Chan Ho-him and Cheng Leng in Hong Kong
