Summary
Taiwan’s coastguard detained a Togolese-flagged cargo ship with a Chinese crew after an undersea communications cable connecting Taiwan to Penghu was cut.
Authorities suspect a possible “grey zone” act—hostile interference short of warfare—by China but have not ruled out an accident.
The ship, which initially ignored radio contact, was intercepted and escorted to port. Taiwan has been monitoring Chinese-linked vessels under flags of convenience due to previous cable damage incidents.
Chunghwa Telecom activated a backup cable, preventing communication disruptions.
Unintentional damage still creates problems, sure. But there are ways to mitigate unintentional damage (e.g. trying to revise ship systems to better warn about a dropped anchor or rules on where to anchor), having it be protocol for shore stations to warn ships with AIS that they’re stopped near cable lines, or clustering cables tightly together and focusing on getting people to not anchor right there that don’t work for intentional damage. Maybe push for minimal international standards on crew training — you maybe can’t ban ships from sailing in international waters, but you can restrict who docks at your ports and can agree with other countries to impose similar requirements.
If your risks are intentional cuts, then you have to deal with a lot of other difficult issues, like “what happens if the state just falls back to using something like underwater drones instead of freighters”. And there are approaches that work for intentional cuts that don’t work for unintentional cuts, like deterring a country by threatening it with serious counteraction if it attacks submarine infrastructure.
So if you’re trying to deal with the problem, you are going to care whether you need to worry about peacetime intentional damage or just unintentional damage. Now, okay, you do still have to be aware that a country could go out and cut cables in a war. Intentional damage is always going to be something to keep in mind. But whether-or-not day-to-day intentional damage is occurring should impact how one responds to peacetime cuts.
My point is that regardless of whether investigators say “this ship tore cables intentionally” or “oops, they screwed up”, penalties need to apply so that:
A) Insurance rates reflect these risks
B) Operators are incentivized to care about not damaging undersea cables
C) Intentional damage will be more obvious, because shipping companies won’t want to risk getting dropped from their insurance for repeat expensive cable cut offenses. (This kind of insurance is mandatory for major shipping ports to allow those ships to dock.) Bad actors will have to use other means to destroy these cables that cannot be easily blamed on negligence.