Sam Roggeveen
Earlier this year, the eagle-eyed American observer of China's military, Tom Shugart, spotted some unusual activity at a Chinese shipyard. Tom is a former US Navy submariner who these days spends a lot of time examining satellite photos and then piecing these together with other bits of evidence appearing on the internet to form sharp judgments about the rapid modernisation of China's military. You can get a sense of Shugart's work through this paper he wrote for the Lowy Institute in 2021.
In this case, the satellite photos appeared to show a number of crane barges clustered around a submarine that was docked at Wuchang Shipyard, where China is known to build diesel-electric submarines and surface ships for its navy.
The incident occurred in May. The reason to mention it now is that The Wall Street Journal has just run a story with quotes from anonymous US government sources claiming that the submarine in question sank while pier-side. The activity spotted by Shugart therefore may have been a salvage operation.
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