3년간 11번 "급소 타격" 중국의 '빌드업'.."타이완 목줄 끊을 것" 죽음의 시나리오 / SBS / 글로벌인사이트

1. Last May, an interesting article was reported in the local Taiwanese media. It stated that negotiations between the Taiwanese government and Starlink had effectively collapsed. Taiwan is included among the five regions in Asia without Starlink: North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, and China. Although Taiwan had staked its future on the introduction of low-orbit satellites, the negotiations ultimately fell through. While there were legal regulatory issues, Elon Musk’s remark that "Taiwan is part of China" was the decisive factor; furthermore, the situation became complicated with claims that the Chinese government pressured Musk not to provide Starlink to Taiwan. Instead, the Taiwanese government is rushing to introduce the European low-orbit satellite network OneWeb and is continuing negotiations with Amazon. They have even set a goal to launch their own low-orbit communications satellites by 2027. Why is Taiwan—a cutting-edge internet society with a small land area and high population density, where over 99% of the population already uses 4G and 5G—clinging to low-orbit satellites to such an extent? 2. Let's look at an incident that occurred in Taiwanese waters last year. In January 2025, an international undersea telecommunications cable was damaged in the waters north of Taiwan. The Taiwanese authorities suspected a cargo ship called the Sun-Xing 39. This vessel, which had been staying in the waters surrounding Taiwan since December 2024, turned off its identification device on the day the cable was severed and subsequently disappeared leisurely toward Korea. Although communications were rerouted to a backup network to avoid a major disruption, Taiwan took the incident very seriously. A month later, in February 2025, an undersea cable connecting the main island of Taiwan and Penghu was damaged again, and Taiwan seized the cargo ship Hongtai 58, which was piloted by a Chinese captain. The prosecution brought the captain to trial on charges of intentionally damaging the undersea cable, and the court sentenced him to three years in prison. Such incidents were not a one-time occurrence. According to Taiwanese authorities, there were five incidents of undersea cable damage in 2025 alone, with three incidents occurring in each of the two years prior. Of course, even if not all cable damage is due to intentional attacks, the situation changes when vessels connected to China repeatedly appear in waters close to China. 3. The scenario Taiwan fears is clear: China disrupting the internet and telecommunications networks before launching an invasion. Island nations are particularly vulnerable to damage to undersea cables. In fact, in the Matsu Islands—which are located only tens of kilometers from mainland China, are small in size, and have few cables—residents experienced internet outages for several weeks after two undersea cables were damaged in succession in February 2023. Online banking stopped, and card payment terminals went dead. Some residents had to gather around telecommunications company buildings in search of public Wi-Fi, and internet speeds dropped to just 5% of normal levels. Taiwanese authorities identified Chinese fishing boats and cargo ships as the culprits responsible for the damage, but whether the actions were intentional was never confirmed. 4. The problem is not merely a matter of the internet slowing down. Interbank payments, stock trading, international remittances, cloud servers, military intelligence, and AI training data all travel along this line—the undersea cable. If the undersea cable is severed, the military command structure, government administrative networks, financial networks, and even emergency communication networks could all collapse. As the AI ​​era advances, the volume of data movement explodes, and the importance of undersea cables grows even greater. However, these undersea cables are easy to attack but incredibly difficult to defend. Undersea cables are long, thin, and mostly privately owned. Laid thousands of kilometers beneath the sea, they are difficult to monitor completely. Even if a ship drags its anchor past, it is difficult to determine whether it was a mistake or a commanded operation. That is why merchant ships, fishing boats, and oil tankers, rather than warships, always appear in such incidents. It is precisely because of this ambiguity that undersea cables are becoming targets of gray-zone warfare. 5. China is not the only country employing such tactics. There have been instances where Europe was turned upside down by incidents involving Russia—or rather, incidents presumed to be the work of Russia. On December 25, 2024, five undersea cables, including EstLink 2, a power cable connecting Finland and Estonia in the Baltic Sea, were severed simultaneously. Investigations revealed that the oil tanker Eagle S, linked to Russia's "shadow fleet," dragged its anchor nearly 90 kilometers, and Finnish prosecutors indicted three individuals, including the ...