The captain of a Chinese-crewed ship has been charged in Taiwan with breaking a subsea cable near the island, the first such formal charge following almost a dozen similar incidents in recent years.
Taiwan’s coast guard seized the Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58, a cargo ship, in February following an incident in which the ship broke a telecommunications link by apparently dropping and dragging its anchor.
At the time, Taiwanese officials — who often complain about Beijing’s “hybrid warfare and covert influence” targeting the self-governing island — said they could not rule out that the damage had been caused as part of a Chinese sabotage campaign targeting the island.
Prosecutors in the city of Tainan announced on Friday that the Chinese captain of the Hong Tai 58, identified only by the surname Wang, was being charged with damaging the cable linking Taiwan with the Penghu Islands, which lies between the Taiwanese and Chinese mainlands.
Wang intended to plead innocent to the charge, added the prosecutors, who described him as having “a bad attitude” and said he was refusing to provide any details about the ship’s true ownership. Seven other crew members, also Chinese nationals, were not being charged and would be transported to China.
The incident comes amid ongoing tensions between Beijing and Taipei, the latter of which has highlighted similar incidents in which cables were damaged in the Baltic Sea in what some suspect to be a Russian sabotage campaign.
Despite these suspicions, there is increasing confidence among Western officials that the series of recent Baltic Sea cable incidents was accidental and not directed by the Kremlin, as previously reported by Recorded Future News.
Although Taiwan has been claimed by Beijing since the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it has been a self-governing territory throughout that period — moving from being a military dictatorship to becoming a multi-party democracy in the 1990s and the world’s foremost producer of advanced semiconductors.
Beijing has repeatedly stressed its intention to “reunify” the territory with the mainland and conducts regular military drills in the Taiwan Strait, and has been linked to widespread cyber hostilities targeting Taiwan and its international supporters.
Recorded Future
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Alexander Martin
is the UK Editor for Recorded Future News. He was previously a technology reporter for Sky News and is also a fellow at the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative.
