<p>Bottom marine heatwaves (BMHWs), i.e., anomalous ocean warming at the seafloor, can happen without concurrent surface marine heatwaves (SMHWs), which pose a serious threat to marine ecosystems and present a challenge to detect and study them adequately. This type of event is called independent BMHWs. This study examines the summertime BMHWs on the continental shelf of the East China Sea (ECS) using oceanic reanalysis data from 1993 to 2020. Our results show that summertime BMHWs in the ECS are generally more intense than SMHWs, with some BMHW events occurring without surface expression. Through heat budget analyses of the 2016 SMHW event and the 2019 BMHW event, we investigated the drivers of independent summertime BMHWs. It is indicated that the occurrences of bottom temperature anomalies in summer are predominantly attributed to oceanic horizontal advection. Specifically, the summertime BMHWs on the central ECS shelf are closely related to the strengthening of the inshore branch of the Taiwan Warm Current (TWC) and the weakening of the offshore TWC branch. These findings provide important insights into the underlying physical processes and diagnostic tools for monitoring and managing independent BMHWs in the ECS.</p>