Taiwan reportedly claims China-linked ship damaged one of its submarine cables

Taiwanese authorities have asserted that a China-linked ship entered its waters and damaged a submarine cable.

Local media reports, and the Financial Times report that a vessel named Shunxing 39 called in the Taiwanese port of Keelung last Friday, and as it left damaged a submarine cable operated by Taiwanese carrier Chungwa Telecom as it steamed towards South Korea.

Chungwa Telecom has apparently said just four fibers were impacted, and its redundancy plans mean connectivity wasn’t disrupted.

Taiwanese media has quoted a local security expert who believes the incident was deliberate, and suggested the ship’s true owner is a Chinese national. Unnamed sources at Taiwan’s coast guard have reportedly supported that theory.

Local port authorities tried to have a word with Shunxing 39’s officers but couldn’t catch up with it in heavy seas. The FT reports that Taiwan hopes South Korean authorities can help once the cargo craft arrives there.

The incident follows the November 2024 allegation that a Chinese vessel deliberately cut submarine cables in the Baltic Sea, and comes as concerns rise about “gray zone warfare” - the practice of harming geopolitical rivals in ways that are hard to tie directly to a sovereign state’s actions. Damaging submarine cables, the world’s essential digital arteries, is a classic gray zone tactic as halting or slowing data flows can hurt a nation but proving the identity of attackers is hard given the links lie on the sea floor and nonstop surveillance of ships is difficult to achieve. Attacks on submarine cables are therefore nearly always plausibly deniable.

That's the case here as it's difficult to nail down details of this incident as while numerous reports claim Shunxing 39 is registered in Cameroon, shipping databases list the vessel as Tanzanian. Evidence of the ship being owned by a Chinese national is also not immediately apparent.

• Taiwan in talks to tap Amazon's Project Kuiper space broadband
• NATO tests aquatic drones to protect cables, coastlines
• Submarine cable resilience board announced on same day maybe-cut-by-China Baltic cable repaired
• Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

What is not in doubt, however, is that China regards Taiwan as a rogue province that must reunify with the mainland and that Beijing has used its military to conduct many maneuvers that demonstrate its ability to potentially disrupt shipping.

In 2023, Taiwanese authorities claimed that Chinese ships accidentally-on-purpose damaged submarine cables to its outlying islands.

Taiwan’s status as the home of chipmaker TSMC, the world’s most sophisticated such concern, means the USA and other nations fear Chinese action could disrupt the supply of critical semiconductors needed to train AI models and put them to work.

Beijing would not mind it if rival nations couldn’t access TSMC tech, as it’s more sophisticated (for now) than product China’s domestic chipmakers can create. The prospect of a kinetic war over semiconductors remains unlikely, but tensions remain high in the Taiwan Strait and this incident won’t ease them. ®