A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed.
Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year.
Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of the world.
Photo: Courtesy of HiFleet and Vessel Finder
The owners of the Shunxing-39 in November last year retroactively declared that the ship on Sept. 28 had departed from South Korea’s Busan for the Port of Keelung, according to China-based My Ship Tracking.
Keelung had no record of the freighter’s arrival.
The China-based HiFleet showed that the Shunxing-39 transited the Taiwan Strait on Sept. 28 and moved toward China’s Guangdong Province without approaching Keelung.
The ship did not stop in any ports before returning to its unknown point of origin.
Records from ship trackers indicated that the freighter on Oct. 10 entered the northern bounds of Taiwan’s contiguous zone, which is 24 nautical miles (44km) from its coast, sporadically deactivating its automatic identification systems.
The ship’s transponders remained deactivated for minutes to several hours each time.
The following day, the Shunxing-39 sailed toward 26° north latitude before changing course.
On Oct. 19, the ship’s transponder signal vanished about 9 nautical miles west of Pengjia Islet (彭佳嶼) and reappeared in the same area on Dec. 5, making circles.
The Shunxing-39 on Friday last week crossed into the nation’s 12-nautical-mile territorial waters and turned off its automatic identification system again following reports of damage to the undersea cable.
The captain of the Chinese ship later told the Coast Guard Administration that it would return to South Korea, which cannot be verified, as its transponder has remained disengaged.
The Chinese cargo ship traveled 439 nautical miles with an average speed of 3.07 knots (5.7kph) without interference from the navy or the coast guard, records showed.
The navy’s and the coast guard’s new protocol is to use the 24-nautical-mile line to divide their areas of responsibility, the Ministry of National Defense said.
The navy would be responsible for detecting large ships outside of that area, while coast guard radar would monitor the waters inside, it said.
Taiwan should use buoys to mark the waters within 50m of Internet cables as a restricted zone to guard them, former navy squadron commander Jiang Hsin-biao (江炘杓) said in a recent newsletter published by the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
Repeated incidents involving damage to undersea cables show the importance of using satellites and microwave links to ensure access to key communications systems, he said.
Additional reporting by CNA
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
The Sports Administration yesterday demanded an apology from the national table tennis association for barring 17-year-old Yeh Yi-tian (葉伊恬) from competing in the upcoming World Table Tennis (WTT) United States Smash tournament in Las Vegas this July. The sports agency said in a statement that the Chinese Taipei Table Tennis Association (CTTTA) must explain to the public why it withdrew Yeh from the WTT tournament in Las Vegas. The sports agency said it contacted the association to express its disapproval of the decision-making process after receiving a complaint from Yeh’s coach, Chuang
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a