Taiwan in an Unfolding Crisis: Are We Witnessing a Boiling Frog Scenario?

The word ‘CRISIS’ could soon become a normal feature of the Taiwan Strait, judging by the recent Chinese activities in the waters surrounding Taiwan. It seems that China has finally begun taking some concrete measures to expand its sea power by making a shift from its years-long strategy of coastal defense to that of power projection in the whole of Western Pacific region.

Earlier this month, a Chinese-owned freighter allegedly severed a critical undersea telecom cable off Taiwan’s northern coast. Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said that it sent a patrol vessel to investigate a report on January 3rd from telecoms provider, Chunghwa Telecom that a subsea communications cable near Keelung had been damaged.

Per the account of events given by the CGA, upon arriving at the scene, the Taiwanese patrol vessel found a Chinese-crewed vessel by the name of ‘Shunxin 39’, with which it managed to establish radio contact and request the captain of the ship to return to port in Taiwan.

Apparently, the Chinese-crewed ship’s captain refused to acquiesce to the requests of Taiwanese patrol vessel and bad weather kept the latter from boarding the Chinese-crewed ship for verification, however, Taiwan’s coast guard said that it “cannot rule out the possibility” the ship was engaged in “grey zone” activities without providing any direct evidence of this.

Based on the ship’s automatic identification system (AIS) and satellite sources, the Shunxin-39 seems to have dragged its anchor in the location where the cable was severed. Also, analysts from the maritime analytics provider, ‘MarineTraffic’ said that the ship in question had been crisscrossing waters near Taiwan’s northern coast since December 1, which led the Taiwanese officials to suspect that the cable damage was not simply an “innocent accident.”

The ship, Shunxin 39 is registered both in Cameroon and Tanzania but owned by a Hong Kong-based company headed by a Chinese national by the name of Guo Wenjie.

The subsea cable that was severed has been operational since 2008 and it connects East Asia to the US’ West Coast. Despite the damage to the cable, Chunghwa Telecom, which is a member of an international consortium that operates the US US$500 million Trans-Pacific Express cable, managed to reroute the traffic to other cables and ensured unhindered service.

However, this is not the first time that Taiwan has faced such accidents with (or alleged attacks on) its undersea communications cable and similar incidents in the past are known to have severely impacted certain parts of the island nation.

For instance, in February 2023, Matsu, a Taiwanese island which is only 48 kilometers away from China’s coast, faced an internet outage when two submarine cables connecting this island to the main island of Taiwan were damaged by Chinese ships in succession within 6 days.

While Chunghwa Telecom managed to activate a microwave backup in the aftermath of this damage, the mobile phone signals of the local people in Matsu were still weak with even the text messages taking 15-20 minutes to be transmitted. Other than that, the online banking services were also suspended which forced the financial transactions to be conducted only in cash.

Being surrounded by sea on all sides as Taiwan is, submarine cables are key for it to remain connected with the world, and therefore, whenever Beijing decides to reunite the island nation with the Chinese mainland, submarine cables would be among the initial targets that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will attack to isolate Taiwan from its allies.

So, more than just to simply intimidate or harass Taiwan, China could be indulging in these gray zone tactics to assess the prospects of disrupting the island nation’s communication networks by testing the measures implemented by the Taiwanese telecom operators to contain the fallout of the damaged submarine cables.

Also, only a month before the damage to the subsea communications cable near Keelung, China conducted its largest military exercise in nearly three decades to demonstrate its capability to blockade Taiwan and project power all through the First Island Chain of Pacific archipelagos that is composed of the Kuril Islands, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyu Islands, the main island of Taiwan, the northern Philippines, and Borneo, basically stretching from the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northeast to the Malay Peninsula in the southwest.

The exercise marked the first instance of the PLA’s Eastern, Southern, and Northern Theater Commands operating together in combined arms drills. Around 60 PLA Navy warships and 30 China Coast Guard (CCG) vessels, together with more than 34 PLA warplanes took part in this exercise which lasted for three days and covered areas ranging from the South China Sea to Japan’s Ryukyu Islands.

This was the fifth such exercise conducted by the PLA, after its unprecedented live fire drills in August 2022 in response to the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, followed by another military drill in October 2022, as well as the three ‘Joint Sword’ series of military exercises conduced in response to the former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with the then US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the US in April 2023, and the current Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s inauguration in May 2024 as well as his National Day speech in October 2024.

Overall, there has been a dramatic increase in the occurrence and scale of Chinese military exercises in waters surrounding Taiwan since mid-2022, and with each exercise, the PLA appears to have been upscaling its capabilities to conduct joint military operations that involve the use of wide range of military assets as well as participation of all branches of the military.

So, in the broad sense, China might as well be trying to set the new normal by increasing the frequency and the overall scope of its military exercises as well as the gray zone tactics it has been engaging in waters surrounding Taiwan, in a manner that would appear far below the threshold of conflict to keep the island nation and its allies guessing about Beijing’s true intent.

Taiwan Risks Becoming China’s Boiling Frog: Part 1

As discussed earlier in brief, there has been an uptick in the incidents of damage to Taiwan’s subsea communications cable in recent years with suspicions running high of China’s involvement as part of its grey zone tactics against the island nation.

What adds to these suspicions is a recent report by the US-based global news magazine, Newsweek, which has brough to light two Chinese-language patent applications in 2020 and 2009 for anchor-like devices capable of severing submarine cables quickly and cheaply.

A team of engineers at Lishui University in China’s Zhejiang province, which is opposite Taiwan, had developed what it referred to as “dragging type submarine cable cutting device” in 2020.

“With the development of science and technology, more and more submarine cables and communication cables are laid on the seabed of all parts of the world and the cables need to be cut off in some emergency situations,” the team from Lishui University wrote.

“The traditional cutting method needs first to detect the position of the cables, then excavate and salvage them for cutting. The process is complex, a lot of expensive equipment is needed, and the cost is too high. There is a need for a fast, low cost cutting apparatus for submarine cables to accomplish this task,” Zhang Shusen, Dai Ying, Fu Changrong, Gao Zikun, Li Xuping and Ji Guangyao wrote.

Whether the submarine cable is successfully severed can be determined by copper residue on the cutting anchor, the patent application said. This is because, copper is the preferred material in the making of conductor inside the subsea cables.