By Robert Stanley | 2025-02-14

In one of its latest efforts to intimidate Taiwan, China appears to have taken a page from Russia's playbook in the Baltics.

Last month, Taiwan's main telecom operator, Chunghwa Telecom, detected a break in the Trans-Pacific Express Cable, an undersea cable connecting the island nation to the rest of the world.

Chunghwa and Taiwan's coast guard, using radar and satellite records of sea traffic, said a freighter with a Hong Kong owner and a Chinese crew likely dragged its anchor over the cable.

The Cameroon-flagged Shun Xing 39 often has been found crawling slowly through the seas of East Asia.

Coast guard personnel were unable to board the ship because of rough seas and allowed it to sail for South Korea.

"An analysis of the ship's historical trajectory has yet to reveal its true intent," Taiwan's coast guard said on January 8.

"However, the possibility of a Chinese-flag of convenience ship engaging in grey-zone harassment cannot be ruled out," it added, referring to tactics that fall short of an act of war.

Chinese coercion

Taiwan has experienced about 30 such breaks in its fiber optic cables between 2017 and 2023, according to The New York Times.

In February 2023, two undersea telecom lines serving Taiwan's outlying Matsu archipelago were cut, disrupting communications for weeks.

Taipei's Communications Commission and locals said at the time that Chinese fishing vessels or sand dredgers might have done the damage.

The incidents bear a resemblance to a string of cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea in recent months that authorities from Estonia to Sweden have blamed on Russia, fueling accusations that Moscow is waging a hybrid war.

Similarly, Taiwan deems the sabotage as part of China's policy to coerce Taiwanese into giving up their resistance to Beijing's rule.

Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, despite an international ruling in 2016 concluding this has no legal basis.

It has been sending civilian and military ships into Taiwanese waters on an almost daily basis for the past several years as it ramps up military pressure on Taipei.

The damaged cable off the coast of Taiwan is one of more than a dozen that help keep the country online.

Concerned that a first wave of attack by China would involve cutting Taiwan's communications, the island, situated about 177km off the east coast of China, has been investing in satellite backups.

'Preparation for future blockade'

The Shun Xing 39 is owned by Hong Kong company Jie Yang Trading Limited, which is directed by a Chinese national.

While the Taiwanese could find no proof that the ship had deliberately cut the cable, the incident occurred far from normal shipping channels.

"We won't rule out the possibility of China destroying the cable through '[grey] zone operations,'" a senior Taiwan coast guard official told CNN.

The aim of such an act would be "to cut Taiwan's international communication as a form of preparation for future blockade and quarantine."

In addition, the ship may have been trying to disguise its identity.

According to an in-depth analysis by the shipping industry website Lloyd's List Intelligence, the ship was operating under three different digital identities, sending out signals to radar and satellite trackers as Tanzania-flagged Xing Shun 39, Cameroon-flagged Shun Xing 39 and Cameroon-flagged Xing Shun 39.

Broadcasting its position under different identities at different times causes "significant confusion" for anyone trying to track the movements of the vessel, said Ian Ralby, chief executive officer of consultants IR Consilium.

Masking a ship's true identity is often ignored by maritime authorities, but it is also "the easiest to identify indicators of other illicit or untoward activity," Ralby told Lloyd's List.

"A lot of vessels that are engaged in suspicious or dubious or outright dangerous behavior are being overlooked because we are essentially turning a blind eye towards a lot of these minor, seemingly innocuous offenses," he said.

Russia's 'shadow fleet'

In the Baltic Sea, blame for the cable-cutting incidents has fallen on a so-called shadow fleet -- a network of aging vessels with opaque ownership structures that transport Russian crude oil and petroleum products despite Western sanctions imposed after the Ukraine invasion.

The most recent incident occurred on December 25, when the Estlink 2 electricity cable and four telecom cables linking Finland and Estonia were damaged. This followed another attack just weeks earlier that targeted two telecom cables.

Finnish authorities said they discovered tracks of an anchor being dragged for nearly 110km along the sea floor and Finnish commandos seized a ship called the Eagle S for suspected sabotage.

"We strongly condemn any deliberate destruction of Europe's critical infrastructure," the European Commission and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said in a joint statement December 26. "The suspected vessel is part of Russia's shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia's war budget."

"We will propose further measures, including sanctions, to target this fleet," the statement said.

The Estlink disconnection came just over a month after two telecom cables were cut in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic Sea.

European officials said on November 19 that they suspected "sabotage" and "hybrid warfare" linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, AFP reported.

Tensions in the Baltic region have intensified since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In September 2022, a series of underwater explosions ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines, which transported Russian gas to Europe. The cause remains undetermined, fueling speculation and geopolitical friction.