Taiwan residents flee as China cuts internet sea cables
Online blackout on Matsu Islands leaves the country racing to secure its critical national networks
Life has been quieter than usual for residents of Taiwan on an outlying archipelago, lined with sleepy fishing villages lapped by ocean waves.
Those in the Matsu Islands have been cut off from the outside world after two submarine internet cables were severed by Chinese ships last month.
All of a sudden, messages stopped sending, online videos weren’t loading, bank transfers failed, and even credit cards couldn’t be swiped.
Lin Shengyue, 80, said: “Calls cut off midway; it’s pretty annoying. But it’s more of a problem for the young people glued to their mobiles.”
“That’s why all of them ran off to the main [Taiwan] island,” he added. “The only ones left are old fogies like me and the soldiers stationed here.”
The internet outage has highlighted a critical security vulnerability – that Taiwan can’t safeguard its communications in the event of a war with China. Lii Wen, head of the Matsu chapter of the country’s leading Democratic Progressive Party, said: “The incident in Matsu actually serves as a warning sign for Taiwan to better prepare its back-up plans. What would we do if Taiwan’s 14 international sea cables were damaged?”
Cables in Matsu have been snapped 27 times in the past five years, often by Chinese fishing vessels dropping anchors and dragging fishing nets.
But this is the longest internet blackout residents have experienced, as repair ships won’t arrive until the end of April to fix the cables – more than 300 miles long and about the width of a garden hose.
Mr Lin added: “Locals like me, we wonder if China cut the cables on purpose. If we really were in wartime, this would be a very serious situation.”
Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, has repeatedly vocalised his intent to annex Taiwan – a country with its own democratic government that Beijing claims as its territory.
US intelligence indicates that Mr Xi has instructed the military to be ready to invade by 2027.
Disrupting Taiwan’s internet in the event of war could obstruct the government’s ability to seek help from other nations and to reassure its public.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said that cutting the cables is a “way of showing that [China] can disrupt the information environment, whether that be civilian, commercial or military.”
Shoring up Taiwan’s communications is a growing priority for the government, especially as China has sought to control installation and maintenance of cables running through international waters it claims as its territory. Most of the world’s online traffic runs through these cables.
But proposals for how to do that reflect the complicated discourse in government and among the public on how best to position Taiwan.
There are plans to install a surveillance system for the cables, though long-term options have been in the works after Taiwan observed Russia’s cyberattacks during its invasion of Ukraine. The Taiwanese ministry of digital affairs is looking for multiple low-earth satellite operators to provide the internet in a crisis, though a law requires them to be majority-owned by a domestic shareholder.
Diversifying is key to create a “honeypot” set-up that could expose any cyber attackers and prevent Taiwan’s communications from being shut down if one provider is incapacitated.
Audrey Tang, the minister of digital affairs, said that if “you put all your eggs into one basket, then of course you’re also saying that you lose everything if that basket holder cuts the basket”.
“Our main idea is just diversity, and working with as many trustworthy vendors as possible.”
She is also planning to roll out mobile non-geostationary satellite receivers to 700 domestic locations and three international ones over the next year. She added that they need to “make sure that this kind of service moves beyond one single county or one single town, so that every county and city in Taiwan has at least one that they can use”.
Others have mooted going in a different direction.
Wang Chung-ming, the county chief, suggested to Chinese officials and a state-owned telecoms company that a new cable be installed between Matsu and the mainland.
After his trip, Mr Wang posted online about pushing forward on “The New Four Links,” first mentioned by Chinese leader Mr Xi in 2019.
Mr Xi’s proposal, emblazoned on a sign in Jieshou – Matsu’s largest village and the seat of the local government – calls for a land bridge to China, plus shared electricity, water and natural gas.
None of this is without precedent. Three undersea cables already connect Taiwan to China, laid about a decade ago, and jointly owned by telecom firms from both sides. Kinmen, another outlying Taiwanese island close to the Chinese coast – even gets its water from the mainland, and a land bridge three decades in the making finally opened last year.
But ties with China, in any form, are under intense debate in Taiwan as the spectre of war grows.
The Matsu and Kinmen island groupings are particularly vulnerable given their proximity to the mainland, and some experts think they could be attacked first in a potential invasion in a piecemeal approach, similar to how Russia first annexed Crimea.
It’s a complicated issue for Matsu’s 14,000 residents, who can see the Chinese mainland from their shores. Along with Kinmen, Matsu has long been on the frontlines of a decadeslong struggle for dominance between China and Taiwan.
For Hong Zhiyin, 28, who only moved to Matsu three months ago, it is impossible to forget that she lives on the front line of a conflict that may erupt at any moment.
She said: “I often heard artillery fire at night – I’m not sure which side it was coming from. It’s my hope that we won’t resort to war.”
‘The only ones left are old fogies like me and the soldiers stationed here’