By Meng Kit Tang

A Myth Before the Launch

In June 2026, the chairman of Taiwan’s China Shipbuilding Corporation’s (CSBC), announced that  the Hai Kun submarine was “on track” for delivery in 2026, but something else he said was even more telling. He added that pressure from the People’s Republic of China “has always existed,” on the program and that even after contracts are signed and parts are built, a shipment of parts can still be stopped at the last minute for political reasons.

That is an unusual thing for a shipbuilder to admit about his own supply chain. It means no deal with the suppliers behind Hai Kun is fully safe from Beijing until the part is delivered and actually installed on the boat.

As of its most recent sea trials in late July, its twentieth in all, the submarine’s delivery date remained officially unset, even as the pace of testing visibly picked up.

The submarine’s name fits this uncertainty better than anyone probably intended. Kun is a giant fish from the ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi, so large no one can say how far it stretches, and it turns, within the same passage, into a bird whose wings blot out the sky. Taiwan named its first homemade submarine after this creature.

Before the boat ever touched water, before a single piece was welded, it already carried a story about becoming something vast, far more than a 2,500-tonne submarine could realistically live up to. A supply chain Beijing could disrupt at any point was never going to live up to it either.

That gap between the name and the actual submarine is really the whole story of this program. The launch ceremony in September 2023 built a big public celebration on top of a name that already promised too much, and in the three years since, the celebration has moved faster than the shipyard.

Delivery keeps slipping. The president has boarded the boat for photos that were later used against him. The ceremony made a statement about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, one that the submarine’s uncertain legal status, its thin and shared torpedo supply, and a follow-on fleet that mostly exists on paper have not yet been able to back up.

The Liturgy of Launch

President Tsai Ing-wen led the launch ceremony at CSBC’s shipyard in Kaohsiung on September 28, 2023. A flag was draped over the submarine’s bow. “History will forever remember this day,” she told the crowd. “In the past, a domestically produced submarine was considered a mission impossible. But today, a submarine designed and built by our countrymen is in front of you.”

Two weeks later, in her National Day speech, she went further: building a submarine at home, she said, had been the dream of Taiwanese presidents for three decades, and now Taiwan had done it. The claim had grown between the two speeches.

One boat was now standing in for thirty years of hope.

By January 2026, when the submarine completed its first dive, the crowd watching had changed too. It was no longer just officials. Ordinary people gathered and chanted “Let’s go, Hai Kun” as it went under. A government can organize a ceremony. It cannot make a crowd show up on its own to cheer a test dive. Whatever problems the program has had, public support for it is real, not just something manufactured from the top.

The ceremony is doing two jobs most countries never have to combine. Building a weapon shows what a country’s industry can do. Being recognized as a state usually needs no proof at all. Taiwan does not have that luxury. Every time the Hai Kun appears in public, it has to do both: show the submarine works, and quietly assert that the government building it has the right to build anything at all.

Three years is a long time to keep a single launch day feeling meaningful. The submarine was originally due to the Republic of China Navy in November 2025. That date has slipped again and again, most recently to sometime in the second half of 2026.

In March 2026, Defense Minister Wellington Koo told reporters the ministry would simply stop giving delivery dates. That’s an unusual thing for a government to admit about its own flagship project. The month before, President Lai told the legislature that Taiwan would be in a stronger position today if a submarine bid had passed back in 2005, when he was still a lawmaker.

It is rare for a sitting president to admit that his signature program is not really a new achievement, but two decades of catching up, done in public.

The ceremony’s own photos have since been used against it. When Lai visited the docked submarine in March 2026, the Presidential Office released photos meant to show confidence and progress. Within days, lawmakers pointed out problems visible in those same photos: missing rivets, water stains, a bunk curtain that would not slide properly.

CSBC admitted the flaws were real, blaming “incomplete restoration following work done.” That’s the shipbuilder’s own explanation, not a critic’s, and it gives away something more telling: the boat had been taken apart and put back together in a hurry, or with the assumption that no one would look too closely, and some pieces never quite made it back into place.

None of this affects whether the submarine can actually dive. What it affects is trust. The government’s own photos, meant to reassure, instead gave an already-doubtful legislature something concrete to point at.

One Hull, A Fleet Still Sung

CSBC has said plainly what these boats are for: making it costly for China to blockade Taiwan or land troops there, and pushing back Chinese carrier groups near the strait.

In short, the goal is not to control the strait outright but to make crossing it expensive. Keep that purpose in mind, because most of what follows is about how much of the fleet meant to do this job does not exist yet.

The number eight has carried a lot of weight in this program’s story ever since Taiwan formalized its plan to build eight submarines at home. CSBC’s chairman complicated that number in May. He said a US assessment of Taiwan’s situation puts the real need closer to twelve boats, based on the standard naval rule that a fleet needs about three hulls for everyone it can keep on active duty, since the rest are in training or repair.

Eight was the ceremony’s number. Twelve, according to the builder’s own account of what Washington thinks Taiwan needs, is the working number.

The torpedoes tell a similar story. Taiwan has a confirmed order for 28 Mark 48 Mod 6 torpedoes, 24 for combat and four for training, arriving in batches: four in 2026, fourteen in 2027, and ten in 2028.

These are not just for Hai Kun. They are to be shared with the two older Chien Lung-class submarines Taiwan bought from the Netherlands in the 1980s, which will likely still be in service when the new torpedoes arrive.

So a navy planning for eight modern submarines will, for years, be working with a torpedo supply sized for a much smaller, older fleet. A parallel case shows how wide that gap between paper and hardware can run: the navy has held a signed contract since 2017 to upgrade 168 lightweight MK-46 torpedoes, used by surface ships and patrol aircraft, to the newer MK-54 standard, originally due by 2022.

Audit findings released this year show it slipped to 2025 through 2027, arrived as scattered, undocumented parts the navy could not assemble into a single working torpedo, and sat for nearly three years after Washington flagged a 91 percent failure rate in the components, without the navy procuring replacements or reassessing the schedule.

Two of the seven follow-on submarines already have a signed contract, the first pair in a build sequence of two, three, and two boats, changed in 2024 from an earlier plan of three, two, and two so the navy could adjust later designs based on lessons from the first boat.

But the roughly one billion Taiwan dollars set aside for those two boats stays frozen until the Hai Kun finishes its sea trials and the defense ministry submits a full report to the legislature. The contract exists. The money does not move until the first boat proves itself.

Right now, the next stage of the fleet is a signature on paper, not steel in the yard.

None of this means the program is failing. Prototype submarines often run late and hit technical problems. Hai Kun’s technical setbacks during 2024 sea trials, and its recovery from them, are unremarkable by the standards of building a first-of-its-kind submarine.

What’s worth noticing instead is the gap between how the two sides of this story get told. The ceremony announced a fleet built to deny an enemy the strait. Three years later, the shipyard has one hull, a torpedo stock it shares with older boats, and a signed contract for two more submarines whose funding won’t move until the first one proves itself.

A state whose international standing partly depends on looking self-reliant has every reason to let the ceremony’s promises outpace the shipyard’s progress, because the political payoff comes the moment the cameras catch the launch, while the military payoff is only tested in a crisis nobody wants to see happen.

The Boats With No Liturgy

The contract for the first two follow-on submarines was signed quietly. No flag, no crowd, no presidential speech. That makes sense: there was no boat yet to photograph, and a ceremony needs something physical to celebrate, a hull, a hatch someone can climb through for the cameras.

A signature on a contract and a frozen budget line do not give a ceremony anything to work with, so nothing was held. The state stays loud about the one submarine it has and silent about the seven it has not.

That difference matters. The 2023 ceremony could afford to oversell, because the boat was real and would eventually prove the claims true or false in public, one sea trial at a time. The seven boats still on paper do not get that kind of scrutiny, because nobody is making loud claims about them yet. That sounds safer, but it might not be.

A promise made in public can be checked against reality, slowly and awkwardly, but checked. A promise never made in public can’t be checked at all. The part of the fleet we know least about is also the part we talk about least, and that’s probably not a coincidence.

A Congregation That Cannot Say Its Own Name

The ceremony has a second audience, one the launch event never addressed because it could not.

Components and technical help for Hai Kun came from engineers and firms in seven countries: Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In several cases the work had to go through arm’s-length companies, because Beijing has long warned that any country helping Taiwan build a submarine would pay a diplomatic price.

None of these governments has stood at a podium beside Tsai or Lai to say what it contributed, a silence that likely protects each supplier’s relationship with Beijing more than it protects Taiwan’s submarine.

Taiwan can claim an internationally assisted, non-Red supply chain. It cannot name who took part, and those who did are not offering.

After the Music Stops

CSBC, Hai Kun’s builder, lost money on the submarine program because of delays and warranty costs. It returned to profit over the next two quarters, supported by both its commercial shipbuilding business and follow-on submarine contracts.

The two sides of the business help sustain each other.

The 2023 launch ceremony is not disproved simply because the navy has yet to receive the submarine. Ceremonies like this are not judged immediately. They are judged over time, as events either confirm or undermine their promises. But that process cannot continue indefinitely.

Every year the Hai Kun remains undelivered widens the gap between the optimism of the launch and the submarine still sitting in dry dock at Kaohsiung.

Eventually, reality catches up. The Hai Kun enters service, joins the fleet, and validates the ceremony in retrospect. Or the follow-on submarines never materialize, leaving the ceremony remembered more clearly than the capability it promised.

Tang Meng Kit is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025.

Featured image: President Lai Ching-te inspects the Hai Kun. (Wikimedia Commons photo)