Taiwan’s coast guard has detained a vessel with Chinese crew members that it claims was caught “in the act” of severing a strategic undersea communications cable, an accusation Beijing dismissed on Wednesday as “political manipulation.”
The Togolese-flagged cargo ship Hongtai was intercepted on Tuesday near a damaged cable connecting Taiwan’s main island to the outlying Penghu Islands after it had been loitering in those waters since Saturday, according to Taiwanese authorities.
“It cannot be ruled out that it was a gray zone intrusion operation by China,” Taiwan’s coast guard said in a statement, using a term describing hostile acts of subversion that fall short of open warfare.
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The incident has heightened concerns about possible coordinated efforts to disrupt Taiwan’s critical infrastructure amid ongoing tensions with Beijing, which claims the democratically-governed island as its own territory.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian rejected the accusations, telling reporters in Beijing that damage to undersea cables was a “common maritime accident” occurring “more than a hundred times a year globally.”
“While the basic facts and the people responsible for the accident have not yet been clarified, the Democratic Progressive Party authorities have deliberately exaggerated the situation in an attempt at political manipulation,” Zhu said, referring to Taiwan’s ruling party.
Taiwanese officials said the vessel, now held at Anping port, presented multiple identities. While identifying itself as the Hongtai 168, its vessel identifier listed it as Hongtai 58, and local media published images showing a third name, Shanmei 7, on its stern.
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All eight crew members were Chinese nationals, and the ship bore Chinese characters on its hull despite flying a Togolese flag, Taiwan’s coast guard said.
The incident follows more than a year of similar cable-cutting incidents that Taiwan has attributed to Chinese vessels. In January, Taiwan reported that a Chinese-linked freighter, the Shunxin39, had likely severed another subsea cable but ignored instructions to turn around for investigation.
“The proximity between the different ‘accidents’ shows that there is indeed a pattern,” Benjamin Blandin, a researcher at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, told Business Insider. “If one day China takes these islands… Taiwan will be partially blind.”
Taiwan compares the indecent to similar cases in the Baltic Sea, where NATO countries have accused Russian-linked vessels of deliberately damaging undersea infrastructure since the Ukraine invasion. European nations have responded by forming a coalition to monitor maritime activity with drones and naval assets.
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China’s Foreign Ministry initially claimed it was “not familiar” with the incident when questioned on Tuesday, adding it was “not a question related to foreign affairs.”
Taiwan has increasingly complained about “gray zone” Chinese activities designed to pressure the island without risking direct conflict, including balloon overflights, sand dredging, and coast guard patrols near the Kinmen Islands that Taiwan describes as “routine harassment.”
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