Written by Charles Mok and Dr Kenny Huang.
Image credit: Diver Checking Underwater Protection of Cable by The Official CTBTO Photostream/ Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0.
One of the most frequently used words in Taiwan in recent years must be “resilience.” The government talks about it, and civil society actors are also setting up programs to prepare the public for it. Resilience, the ability to withstand adversity and the elasticity to recover from interruption are clearly what Taiwan needs, as the island withstands daily external interference and persistent threats of a complete blockade.
Resilience encompasses a broad range of concepts and can take on various meanings. However, in today’s world, where virtually all social and economic activities rely on constant digital communications, it is easy to overlook the fundamental and vital layer of resilience: the undersea cable systems. Taiwan is linked to the global network through 15 undersea cables that collectively provide over 100 Tbps of internet bandwidth, enabling one of the highest internet penetration rates worldwide, with 21.71 million Taiwanese users. This connectivity is crucial, as it underpins all of Taiwan’s critical industries, government functions, national security operations, and social interactions. Moreover, Taiwan actually has a long history of being affected by undersea cable disruptions, especially due to earthquakes. More recently, in February 2024, two undersea cables connecting Matsu, Taiwan’s outlying island only 9 kilometres from the Chinese mainland, with Taiwan’s main island, were allegedly cut by a Chinese fishing vessel and a Chinese cable ship, respectively, within a week. The incident sent a warning signal across Taiwan, but the biggest risk Taiwan faces is not about Matsu or other outlying islands being disconnected. It is about Taiwan being cut off altogether.
Without a doubt, undersea cable disruptions have become a focus of international concern. From natural disasters such as the 2022 underwater volcano eruption near Tonga to the “accident” of the gas line and data cables in the Baltics cut by a Chinese cargo vessel in October 2023 or the Yemeni Houthi rebels’ attack on cables in the Red Sea in 2024, undersea cables have become a critical asset for economic and national security as well as a target in any conflict situation.
It is crucial to recognise that one of the major challenges associated with undersea cable damage is the lengthy repair time. The industry is primarily dominated by a few specialised companies, including SubCom from the United States, NEC from Japan, Alcatel from France, and the rapidly emerging Huawei Marine Network from China. These companies often prioritise the construction of new cables, overtaking repair jobs, which contributes to delays in restoring damaged cables.
That is why we recommend the Taiwan government investigate the strategic viability and the potential incentives necessary to build its domestic cable repair capabilities by working with its own well-established shipping and ship-building industry and exploring cooperation with leading US or Japanese companies and fleets with undersea cable construction and repair expertise. As a reference, SubCom has commissioned a new deployment centre in Subic Bay, Philippines, to serve as its regional logistical staging centre. Why not Taiwan?
Satellites as a substitute?
There is also a common fallacy in believing that satellite communications can replace cable connectivity, a notion that may have been boosted by the hype surrounding Starlink’s support for Ukraine. But the reality is that the west side of Ukraine is connected to countries such as Poland, so for much of its civilian connectivity, it still has options. Satellite connectivity is mainly used to provide support for critical government and military operations.
But the real bad news for Taiwan is that it cannot even think about depending on Starlink. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, which provides the Starlink service, was unabashed in admitting in a 2022 interview that Beijing officials not only complained of his rollout of Starlink in Ukraine, they also told him not to launch Starlink in China, which, considering them as words from Chinese officials, must include Taiwan as a part of China.
This highlights why Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) has prioritised its cyber resilience strategy on assessing the feasibility of low and medium Earth orbit satellite systems. The ministry is collaborating with emerging satellite internet providers from Europe, which currently trail behind Starlink. Moreover, Taiwan’s Space Agency (TASA) plans to launch six satellites starting in 2026, with an investment of US$1.23 billion. However, the Taiwanese government has acknowledged that these efforts will mainly target equipment deployment in outlying islands, remote villages, and areas lacking reliable communication backup. This raises a critical question: what will happen regarding the most significant threat—being completely cut off from the outside world?
Re-alignment risks and opportunities
In fact, we look at Taiwan’s current situation as more than challenges and threats. It is also an opportunity to think out of the box, find new solutions that may be new to Taiwan, and turn it around to create new opportunities as the geopolitics and geo-economical risks of Southeast and East Asia are being re-aligned.
First, since 2019, Hong Kong was cut off by the US government, which would no longer issue licenses for any US operators to connect or terminate their cables to the special administrative region of China. That led to cables invested by Google, Meta, and Amazon to be redirected to Taiwan, the Philippines and Guam. The South China Sea, which was and still is one of the most congested waterways in terms of undersea cable concentration, is also becoming increasingly contentious and treacherous. Since 2023, China has started to impede new undersea cable projects by requiring permit applications for seafloor prospecting and any engineering work, even outside of its internationally recognised waters.
These factors have transformed the traditional trans-Pacific cyber corridor that routinely goes from the western US coast to Japan, then Hong Kong, and finally Singapore. Instead, more and more new cable investments would route through Guam and the Philippines, then around Indonesia and Malaysia, and back up to Singapore. This re-alignment is affecting not just Taiwan but also other East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea. And Japan has been actively seeking new cable opportunities with not just North America, but also across the Arctic to the Nordic countries of Europe.
That is exactly why Taiwan must seize the opportunity and partner more closely with its two nearest northern and eastern neighbours, Japan and the Philippines, to make itself part of a “transfer station” of this new alignment of digital traffic, providing more redundancy to Taiwan itself, while making the island a new Internet hub of East and Southeast Asia.
Thinking outside the box
To make this work, Taiwan must rethink and devise its playbook to entice more investment for undersea cable infrastructure, which traditionally has been dominated by consortiums formed by telecom companies but is increasingly being challenged by more deep-pocket Big Tech players such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Here, Taiwan may consider borrowing part of the European Commission’s recommendations on “Secure and Reliant Submarine Cable Infrastructure,” where the EU countries first take a holistic approach to focus its policies on not only the cables themselves but also the landing stations, repair centres, fleets and vessels, and so on. For projects deemed favourable to “European interests,” financing may be possible through coordinating with national investment banks in Europe or from respective member states, as well as private investors.
If Internet platform companies can find it necessary and beneficial to invest in the infrastructure that they so depend on, rather than only relying on the telecom companies, why shouldn’t other critical industries do the same thing? For Taiwan, this may mean the biggest key players in its semiconductor and electronics supply chain, as well as other companies in the financial sector. To be more direct, if Huawei can invest in cable construction and its infrastructure and compete with TSMC at the same time, why can’t or shouldn’t TSMC think about having a stake in keeping itself and Taiwan connected with the world?
Finally, for all these to happen, a multi-stakeholder expert group on digital resilience, with inputs from the industries, civil society and academia can be set up with the priority to bring in innovative ideas. But even more importantly, Taiwan’s government must elevate its digital resilience strategy to its highest level of government policy discussion and decisions. In other words, the technical bureaucracy level, such as MODA, will not be sufficient or efficient enough to coordinate between the different agencies and ministries. To keep Taiwan on, the highest level at the executive branch, or the president himself, must drive the car.
This article is a summary of the paper, “Strengthening Taiwan’s Critical Digital Lifeline: An Analysis of Taiwan’s Undersea Cable Network Resilience,” on July 29, 2024, by the authors. The paper was presented in the Taiwan Internet Governance Forum (TWIGF) Tutorial Workshop on August 20, 2024.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/gdpi/publication/strengthening-taiwans-critical-digital-lifeline
Charles Mok is a Research Scholar of the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Centre at Stanford University and a member of the Trustee of the Internet Society.
Dr Kenny Huang is the chair of the Executive Council of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre and the chair of the board of the Taiwan Network Information Centre.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Digital Governance in Taiwan’.
Taiwan Insight 