Andrew Singer Talks About China and America
Vol. 3, Issue 17
China and America: The Underwater Connection
Understanding the Chinese and American relationship with a co-emphasis on understanding America as well as China. Today I look at the connections that physically bind our two countries.
Fiber-optic cables. 95-99% of all digital telecommunications around the world are carried underwater through almost 1,500,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cables laid, buried, and anchored on the floors of the earth’s oceans, seas, gulfs, and bays. This is enough cable to wrap our planet thirty times (link). Global communications and commerce are dependent on these hidden data highways, and the already-heavy demand is expected to grow significantly over the coming decades.
These highways, however, are easily disrupted. At the moment, a Chinese ship carrying a Russian cargo is in a timeout in international waters between Sweden and Denmark. The bulk carrier, Yi Peng 3, is alleged to have “deliberately dragged its anchor for more than 100 miles to cut two underwater cables in the Baltic Sea [last month]” (link). Investigations are underway. Whether accidental or not, cable cuts are not an uncommon occurrence in today’s maritime world. From Europe to the Middle East to Asia, they are happening with increasing regularity.
The United Nations just last week created a new, related advisory body, the International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience. The IABSCR will attempt to facilitate conversations and “draw up agreements on ‘basic cable resiliency practices,’ including cable protection from accidents caused by, for example, fishing or natural disasters, and to facilitate permit approvals from governments when any damage happens in territorial waters or continental shelves” (link). For the moment both China and America have representatives on the advisory body.
The intensive, but lower tech business of laying and maintaining undersea cables has become part of the geopolitical tussle between the long-dominant U.S. and the new power on the block, China. Both China and America are concerned with data privacy protection and national security. Both are vocal in wanting to control the links that carry their respective data. Neither trusts the other.
This contest takes the form of both nations using back-channel and overt governmental pressure against countries and companies as well as permitting and other delays for individual projects to disrupt the other. China/America is demonstrating the desire and will to govern the transmission lines coming into its borders and carrying its data in order to protect the same from being hacked by America/China. The outcomes include slowing construction and repair of cables, longer and less optimal routes, losses on investments, increased costs and time, and impaired connectivity impacting everyone.
This is an area that is unfortunately ripe for decoupling. Chinese and American companies, and there are several powerhouses in each country, can each respectively source domestic or controlled equipment, labor, material, and know-how in this field. In short, the two countries do not need each other to build and maintain the infrastructure of global digital communications.
The Asia-Pacific region has been and continues to be a cable hot spot with dozens of new cables being proposed, in construction, and/or to-be-laid over the near term. But all is not smooth over the past several years given the Sino-American tensions (link):
Due to American government pressure, three transpacific cable projects with American financing have been rerouted to avoid geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.
Another multinational project in the South China Sea with American financing is four years overdue, while several other projects without American involvement are proceeding to completion in 2025 and beyond.
Due to pressure from both sides, projects to link the U.S. West Coast and Hong Kong, including one that had financing from companies of both countries and had been mostly built, have been blocked and abandoned. China does not want America directly touching China, and America does not want China directly touching America.
The following analysis from the Mercator Institute for China Studies will make the job of the U.N.’s new international advisory body more challenging, if not also more necessary: “‘more and more’ parallel subsea cables will likely emerge, leading to two separate networks, one led by the U.S. and its allies, and another by China and its partners. Executives and analysts described this as ‘one world, two systems’-- which is rapidly becoming a reality under the waves” (link).
Interesting thank you