By AFP and Focus | 2025-04-17

TAIPEI -- In a significant legal development, Taiwanese prosecutors have for the first time charged a Chinese ship captain with intentionally damaging an undersea telecommunication cable connecting Taiwan to its outlying Penghu islands.

The indictment, announced by the Tainan District Prosecutor's Office on April 11, underscores escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait and highlights the increasing use of so-called gray-zone tactics -- a set of activities that occur between peace and war -- by Beijing.

The captain, identified by his surname Wang, was charged with destroying undersea cable-related facilities in violation of Taiwan's Telecommunications Management Act.

A prosecution first

Wang's ship, the Hong Tai 58, is a Togolese-registered freighter with Chinese funding and a full Chinese crew. It has been detained in Taiwan since late February, following the incident that disrupted communications between Taiwan and Penghu. If convicted, Wang could face up to seven years in prison.

China's Foreign Ministry would not comment on Wang's case but insisted Taiwan was "an inseparable part of China's territory," AFP reported.

Wang allegedly ordered his crew to lower an anchor claw into the seabed in a prohibited anchoring zone marked on the ship's electronic charts, said prosecutors.

He then maneuvered the vessel in a zigzag pattern to intentionally damage the undersea cable.

Wang has shown a "bad attitude," denied responsibility and refused to identify the vessel's true ownership, say prosecutors. The other seven crew members will not be charged but await deportation.

This case marks Taiwan's first known prosecution of a Chinese captain over a cable-cutting incident and comes amid a noticeable uptick in damage to Taiwan's domestic and international undersea cables.

In recent years, the Taiwan-Matsu cables experienced an average of 5.1 damage incidents per year, which is significantly higher than the global average of 0.1 to 0.2 incident per cable per year, according to a report by Taiwan's Control Yuan.

Heightened concerns in Washington

Taiwan's coast guard has been monitoring 52 "suspicious" Chinese-owned vessels operating under flags of convenience from countries such as Togo, Cameroon and Tanzania. Of these, it has rated 15 as a "threat."

Ships like the Hong Tai 58 operate in Taiwan's territorial waters for extended periods, complicating efforts to regulate or deter their activities, say authorities.

The incident with the Hong Tai 58 coincides with heightened concerns in Washington over China's increasingly aggressive military and hybrid operations near Taiwan.

"The PLA [People's Liberation Army] escalated military pressure against Taiwan by 300% in 2024," Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee April 10, according to his published statement.

"China's increasingly aggressive actions near Taiwan are not exercises; they are rehearsals," he told the committee.

A war over Taiwan, he added, would raise "the proliferation question with nuclear armed states ... and minimal warning for launch among those nuclear states."

As for economic fallout, the war would cost Asia 25% of its gross domestic product (GDP), cost the United States 10-12% of its GDP, and contraction in Asia, a 10-12% drop in US GDP and "likely 500,000 excess deaths of despair" in the United States. He did not give the time frame for the excess deaths.

Paparo touched on Chinese gray-zone misdeeds when answering a question by Senator Jacky Rosen about the "frequent attempted sabotage of internet cables."

Paparo cited two possible responses: first, gathering enough intelligence beforehand "to be there in the locations where they would be otherwise cutting those cables in order to deter that activity." Second, the United States can help build "other redundant networks" less vulnerable to sabotage, through "proliferation in low Earth orbit [and] middle Earth orbit."

Cables become a flashpoint

Undersea cables have increasingly become a flashpoint in China's coercion of Taiwan. Taiwan maintains 14 international and 10 domestic undersea cables, which carry everything from internet traffic and phone calls to multinational financial transactions.

Wang's prosecution serves as a legal and symbolic step for Taipei, which is seeking to hold Beijing-linked actors accountable for gray-zone activities that fall below the threshold of war but are nonetheless disruptive and damaging.

In a related development, a US satellite startup is set to launch the first MicroGEO communication satellite dedicated to Taiwan. The satellite would harder to sabotage than undersea cables are.

This initiative aims to strengthen the self-ruled democracy's resilience against potential Chinese attempts to impose an information blackout in the event of an invasion, according to Bloomberg.