Comment by zinekeller

> it makes sense to land transpacific cables in Japan or Taiwan and pick up traffic there rather than going non-stop to China.

US-Russia, sure, probably, but this is not the case with US-China. PLCN (https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/p...), which was planned to land on Hong Kong (not even mainland China), has been significantly modified (now lands to Taiwan and the Philippines, with no sister cable to Hong Kong) due to objections from the US. There are also other plans to have a direct Shanghai-US connections (mainly for lower latency for financial information) that both governments have basically killed due to national security concerns.