Hong Kong Taiwan, after the Baltics. Crucial underwater cables that connect U.S. allies have been damaged or severed in a series of instances, the most recent of which occurred this month.
Amid increased geopolitical tensions, several have been characterized as acts of sabotage, with China and Russia being blamed.
The largest telecom provider on the Beijing-claimed island, Chunghwa Telecom, notified authorities that an international underwater cable had been damaged on January 3, prompting Taiwan’s coast guards to say early this month that they had intercepted the Xing Shun 39, a Hong Kong-owned freighter carrying the Cameroonian and Tanzanian flags.
According to the Coast Guard, a preliminary examination indicated that the ship that was passing through the area at the time of the event may have been responsible for the damage.
According to the International Cable Protection Committee, there are typically 200 cable faults every year, therefore damage to underwater communications equipment is relatively unusual. Ship anchors and fishing practices like trawling, which involves dragging large machinery across the seafloor, are mostly to blame.
However, according to the Taiwanese government, this might have been an instance of Chinese gray-zone intervention, which refers to irregular military and non-military strategies used to weaken an adversary without actually waging a shooting war.
Additionally, it coincides with a commotion in Europe as NATO increases patrols of the Baltic Sea cables that supply electricity and facilitate nearly all intercontinental connection, including the internet.
To examine regional security challenges, such as Russian cable sabotage, members of the defense bloc with access to the Baltic Sea were scheduled to gather in Helsinki on Tuesday.
Since the data was sent to other cables, the damage from the Jan. 3 incident did not interfere with connections in Taiwan.
However, Ian Li Huiyuan, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, stated that if enough cables were severed, it could result in something as serious as an internet blackout. particularly in the case of Taiwan, which is an island with no overland options.
According to Reuters, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office claimed last week that Taiwan was purposefully inflaming the so-called gray zone danger and making unfounded claims, claiming that undersea cables were damaged by frequent marine mishaps.
In response, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which sets China policy, stated that the evidence will guide the probe.
Citing comparable incidents in Baltic states that are thought to involve Chinese vessels, it claimed that Chinese flag-of-convenience ships had a poor reputation in the international community.
The race to protect cables
Although it can be challenging to tell if a cable was intentionally destroyed or not, increased geopolitical tensions have sparked concerns that some critical infrastructure damage may be sabotage.
Following the damage to its Estlink 2 cable on Christmas Day, Estonia announced last month that it will use naval resources to safeguard cables that connect it to Finland. A Russian oil ship that was impounded following the event and may have been dragging its anchor over the bottom is being investigated by Finland.
Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, stated last month that three cases in a single year cannot be a coincidence.
Additionally, NATO is sending at least two ships for monitoring in the Baltic Sea region.
Although Russia’s shadow fleet of smuggling ships is the main target of the alliance’s heightened awareness, Chinese-owned ships have also been the subject of suspicion, as demonstrated in November when one freighter was detained for weeks in Danish seas following the breaking of two fiber-optic cables.
Following its departure from the Russian port of Ust-Luga on the Gulf of Finland, the ship Yi Peng 3 was accused of damaging cables that connected Sweden and Lithuania as well as Finland and Germany. Investigators from Sweden and other nations were permitted to board the ship, and it proceeded with its voyage.
Although they did not specify whether any evidence had been discovered, Swedish authorities stated that they were pleased with the inspection. China has stated that it will continue to assist the investigation’s regional authorities.
While European authorities have detained ships suspected of sabotage, they have refrained from publicly accusing Beijing or Moscow in the lack of hard evidence.
Nonetheless, Taiwan is seeing increased worry.
Patrolling underwater wires takes a lot of time. Yisuo Tzeng, a researcher at Taiwan’s defense ministry-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said it puts additional strain on the coast guard and increases its resource consumption.
Although it was hard to verify the Xing Shun 39’s intentions on January 3, the Taiwanese coast guard stated that it could not completely rule out the potential that the ship was participating in gray-zone interference.
The coast guard said that poor weather prevented it from boarding the ship, but it had requested that South Korean authorities gather evidence at Busan, the ship’s destination port.
A few miles off the northern city of Keelung, Taiwan, where an underwater cable links the island to both China and the United States, Marine Traffic data revealed the freighter’s odd movements that day.
According to some observers, it could be too soon to hold Beijing accountable for the outage because the cable is also connected to China.
“We’re talking billions of dollars of investment loss if there is a half-day, an hour-long outage of a particular cable,” said Gerard Parr, a professor of telecommunications engineering at the University of East Anglia in Britain and a former submarine cable project manager.
He went on to say that there is no benefit to this because maintaining the cable has financial worth.
Chunghwa Telecom, the Taiwanese behemoth that co-owns the Trans-Pacific Express, a roughly 11,000-mile underwater system that links Taiwan with China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, has not disclosed which cable was destroyed.
The cables are jointly owned by businesses from each of those locations.
Since Taiwan and China are connected to the same networks, we are examining a shared infrastructure and risk scenario. Cynthia Mehboob, a researcher at the Australian National University who focuses on undersea cables in the Indo-Pacific, stated that this information should not be disregarded.
According to the Taiwan Coast Guard, the freighter’s seven crew members were all Chinese. It stated that Jie Yang Trading, a Hong Kong business that was incorporated in 2020 based on public data, was the owner of the ship.
Guo Wenjie, its Chinese national director, claimed that his ship caused the damage, claiming there was no proof at all.
According to the ship captain I spoke with, it was an ordinary journey for us, he told Reuters.
Guo could not be reached by NBC News.
A 2023 event in which the 14,000 residents of the Taiwan-controlled Matsu islands, which are near the Chinese mainland, lost internet access when two underwater cables linking them were severed is partly to blame for Taiwan’s mistrust of Beijing.
Authorities at the time claimed that the cables had been damaged by a Chinese freighter and fishing craft, but they did not provide any proof that the damage was intentional.
In the same year, a gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland was destroyed by another Chinese vessel, the NewNew Polar Bear. Beijing claimed it was an accident and waited months to acknowledge that its ship was to blame.
According to Parr, this has exposed the vulnerabilities of these cables that have been hidden from view in previous years.