TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Attacks on strategic undersea telecom cables off the coast of Taiwan are not new, but when one was suspected of being severed off its northern coast by a Chinese-owned ship in early January, it fit a growing pattern.
Just a few weeks earlier, a Russian-flagged ship had cut an electricity cable running between Finland and Estonia in the Baltic Sea.
That followed several similar developments in the Baltic involving Chinese-flagged ships harming undersea infrastructure, including severing fiber-optic cables in November and damaging a gas pipeline in October 2023.
For Gabrielius Landsbergis, who served as Lithuania’s foreign minister until December, the string of incidents highlights how the dividing lines between simmering tensions with the West and Russia over the war in Ukraine are blurring with China’s aggression in the South China Sea as it claims the self-ruled island of Taiwan as its own.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt that Russia is behind these incidents in the Baltic,” Landsbergis told RFE/RL in an interview as he visited Taiwan. “For China, there is no clear attribution, but if it wanted to build up pressure on Taiwan through a shadow war by cutting cables, there are lessons to learn about that from Moscow.”
While China has supported Russia diplomatically since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, helped its economy, and bolstered its war effort by supplying dual-use technology for the battlefield, the prospect of growing coordination between Beijing and Moscow represents a new challenge for the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
"China is trying to create a new normal around Taiwan,” Chiu Chui-cheng, the minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the body that spearheads relations with Beijing, told RFE/RL. “Beijing’s goal is to shrink the buffer zone between us and make it that much easier for it to escalate, if it decides to.”
The recent cable incident is the latest of what Chiu says has been a steady uptick in such events -- ranging from new military exercises intended to simulate a blockade of the island to a threefold increase in suspected Chinese espionage cases -- meant to lay the groundwork for future moves against Taiwan.
“We don’t see these as accidents, we see them as strategy,” he said, referring to an increase in incidents targeting undersea infrastructure around Taiwan in recent years.
Living In The 'Gray Zone'
Fears over a potential Chinese invasion are far from the surface of everyday life in Taiwan’s lush, urban capital.
But the realities of these shifting dynamics are also setting in. During his campaign, Trump said that Taiwan doesn’t pay enough for its own defense and raised doubts over the level of U.S. support in the event of a Chinese invasion.
For the island’s policymakers, that’s raised concerns that severing underseas cables as part of so-called “gray zone” operations -- the term often used by Taiwanese officials to refer to the hybrid tactics used to intimidate the island but which remain below the threshold for war -- will make it harder to defend against Chinese aggression should it escalate to an outright attack.
China has denied involvement in the January cable damage in Taiwan and investigations into the incidents in the Baltic Sea are still under way.
While these cable episodes highlight the vulnerability of crucial offshore infrastructure and the difficulties in prosecuting sabotage, analysts say that they are part of a worrying new security climate in frontline areas near Ukraine and Taiwan that could easily escalate in the coming years as Trump takes office.
“These hybrid tactics that we’re seeing from China and Russia are meant to create favorable conditions for them if an opening presents itself to carry out a larger move,” Sari Arho Havren, an associate fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL. “It seems there is also a desire to signal some red lines to Washington as Trump comes into office.”
A New Normal
While Trump has vowed to quickly end the war in Ukraine, the risk of tensions between Beijing and Taipei escalating into a conflict appears to be rising.
U.S. officials have warned in recent years that China is preparing for a potential invasion of Taiwan, a call echoed by Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, during his January 15 U.S. Senate confirmation hearing.
“We need to wrap our head around the fact that unless something dramatic changes, like an equilibrium [between China and Taiwan], where they conclude that the costs of intervening in Taiwan are too high, we're going to have to deal with this before the end of this decade," Rubio said.
Added to the rise in hybrid encounters and growing tensions is stepped-up military cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.
Recently, Chinese and Russian bombers have flown exercises near Alaska, conducted naval drills together off the coast of South Africa, and carried out live fire exercises in the South China Sea.
The joint war games are part of a pattern of more than a decade of enhanced military coordination and one of the more visible expressions of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s alignment, which is held together by a shared desire to counterbalance the United States.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, has recorded 102 joint war games, multilateral military drills, or patrols from 2003 to the end of July 2024. Since then, an additional four exercises involving China and Russia have occurred. According to CSIS data, their militaries held at least four and as many as 10 joint drills each year between 2014 and 2023. The two countries carried out 11 exercises together in 2024.
U.S. policymakers have repeatedly warned in recent years about the risks posed by China and Russia’s growing partnership -- from economic support to growing military cooperation -- with one congressionally mandated report describing China and Russia’s deepening alignment as “the most significant strategic development in recent years.”
“As a military planner, you need to prepare for the worst-case scenario, which is Russia and China teaming up in a major way,” said Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses who studies Chinese foreign policy.
Taken together, the trend raises difficult questions for the Trump administration and other U.S. policymakers who have long factored how to deal with each nuclear-armed power separately, but now must plan for the risk of dealing with both, especially how China and Russia could act together in any potential future conflict in Europe or the Asia-Pacific.
“It’s still unclear how this would all play out and this isn’t a true military alliance,” said Wishnick. “But within the contours of where Beijing and Moscow like their cooperation to be, it’s growing.”
