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There are Chinese patents on "A Drag-Type Submarine Cable Cutting Device and Its Cable Cutting Method" and "A Deep-Sea Optical Cable Submarine Shearing and Salvaging Device"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wing_Kong_Exchange/comments/1h8es3w...

Can anyone with any maritime knowledge answer:

1) How easy would it be to deliberately time an anchor drop to damage a cable?

2) Why would a ship drop anchor outside a port? Is this a malfunction that happens a lot, or is it rare/unheard of?

Taiwan is under constant pressure from China, a lot of it incredibly petty, so there's a motive for a deliberate cable cut. But I'm unsure of the viability of using a rusty civilian ship to do this.

EDIT: and which cable was it? The nearest to Keelung is the ACPN-2 branch linking Tamsui, Taiwan to Shantou, China.

EDIT2: read the article more carefully, it was this one:

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/trans-paci...

quite far north of keelung to drop anchor, but as aforementioned I am ignorant of maritime operations.

It’s the powered dragging that damages the under sea infrastructure, and when the drag marks run for miles or patterns indicating intent, it can only be intentional.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gy27qiKVCSI

https://gcaptain.com/finland-finds-anchor-drag-marks-left-by...

Right so I suppose any idiot can just drag an anchor until it cuts something. I am doing an amateur job trying to triangulate from that under sea cable map to google earth with sea depth, but it looks like everything around there is no more than 60m deep max, how long would an anchor for that kind of ship be?
Covered starting at 8 minutes 30 seconds in the YouTube link I provided above. ~200 meters of anchor chain.
Alright, so we have motive, means, and opportunity. Seems fairly likely it was deliberate.