2025-01-09
6 分钟If a thing happens, a thing has happened.
Thing happens twice, it's a coincidence, three times it's a trend upwards of that.
Certainly the stuff from which Foreign Desk explainers may be hewn off the northeast coast of Taiwan, an undersea cable has been damaged.
There has been, as has been cunningly foreshadowed, a fair bit of this sort of thing recently, and not only in the vicinity of Taiwan, and we shall get to that presently.
But first to the most recent incident, with the caveat that so frequently are undersea cables getting twanged of late, that it is far from impossible that another might have gone between the recording and the broadcast of this explainer.
And indeed, it is not completely inconceivable that some of the Foreign Desk's vast and discerning global audience may have been deprived of even hearing this precisely because of such an occurrence.
Beat that.
Alanis Morrissette Listeners too young to appreciate this deft mid-90s cultural reference can ask a parent on January 3, one of the fibre optic cables which links Taiwan to other countries in the region was cut by means of a ship's anchor dragging the ocean floor.
No great disruption was occasioned.
Taiwan, long used to living with menace and harassment, is more diligent than most countries where backup contingency planning is concerned.
Chunghua Telecom acted swiftly to reroute data via other cables, and none of our Taiwanese listeners hello, and Happy New Year to you.
Missed anything?
The culpable vessel appears to have been a conspicuously rusty freighter, variously listed as the Shun Qing 39 or the Xingshan 39, flying the flag of either or both Cameroon and Tanzania, broadcasting its position from two sets of identification equipment, all of which just sounds tremendously above board.
But owned by Hong Kong company Jiang Trading, whose sole director is a Chinese citizen, as are the ship's crew.
It was traveling from the Taiwanese port of Keelung to Busan in South Korea when the cable was damaged.
Taiwanese authorities do not appear to be spending much time contemplating the innocent accident.
Just one of those things.
Hypothesis the extremely thinly veiled assertion of Taiwanese authorities is that the cable was deliberately cut on the instructions of China.
It is on form, not an outrageous allegation.
Undersea cables connected to Taiwan have been cut perhaps 30 times in the last five years alone.