Taiwan’s coast guard detained a cargo ship and its Chinese crew on Tuesday and said it was investigating whether the vessel had deliberately cut an undersea internet cable, in the latest possible breach of the island’s communication lines.
The vessel suspected of damaging the cable connecting Taiwan to its outlying Penghu Islands carried a “flag of convenience” and was crewed by eight Chinese nationals, Taiwan’s coast guard said in a statement.
A “flag of convenience” vessel is one that flies the flag of a country other than the country of ownership.
The ship “Hong Tai,” registered in the West African nation of Togo with Chinese funding, had been lingering near the cable in waters off the southwestern coast of Taiwan since Saturday evening and did not respond to multiple broadcasts from Taiwan’s coast guard, the statement added.
Shortly after the ship dropped anchor in the early hours of Tuesday, Taiwan’s telecom company Chunghwa Telecom detected that the cable had been disconnected.
The coast guard said it intercepted and boarded the vessel, before escorting it back to a port in the city of Tainan for investigation.
Taiwanese authorities said they could not rule out the possibility of a Chinese “gray zone operation,” a coercive or subversive act that falls below the threshold of war.
“Whether it was an intentional act of sabotage or purely an accident needs to be further probed,” the coast guard said in the statement, adding that the matter is now under investigations by prosecutors “in accordance with national security-level guidance.”
In recent years, multiple undersea telecoms cables around Taiwan have suffered suspicious damage.
In January, Taiwanese authorities said a Chinese-linked cargo vessel could have cut an international undersea cable off the island’s northern coast.
In 2023, Taiwan officials blamed Chinese ships for two incidents in which cables connecting Taiwan’s main island to its outlying islands of Matsu were damaged, causing an internet blackout. They stopped short of saying the acts were deliberate.
The incidents have raised concerns among Taiwan authorities of “gray zone” activities that could hamper the island’s internet and communications with the outside world.
Those concerns come as Taiwan has faced increasing intimidation from Beijing, which claims the self-ruled democracy as its own territory and has vowed to take control of it, by force if necessary.
They also follow a string of incidents in recent years of damage to undersea infrastructure worldwide, including communications cables. Two high-profile incidents in the Baltic Sea involved Chinese ships and remain under investigation.
According to NATO chief Mark Rutte, more than 95% of internet traffic globally is carried via undersea cables, with some 1.3 million kilometers of such cabling securing an estimated $10 trillion dollars of international trade daily.