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
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