China’s Fishing War

China’s infamous fishing fleet ranks among the gravest emerging threats to global security: a flagrant assault on the environment, a direct attack on human life in the developing world, and an unrepentant tool to assert Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions.

Beijing operates the world’s largest fishing fleet, deploying up to 800,000 vessels, and is responsible for a staggering 44% of the world’s visible fishing activity. Having already exhausted much of its own coastal waters through decades of rampant overfishing, Beijing turned outward, investing heavily in distant-water fishing (DWF). China’s DWF strategy has enabled its fleets to operate far beyond its own exclusive economic zone (EEZ), travelling vast distances and remaining at sea for extended periods of time, while targeting species more valuable or abundant than those available at home.

Ever since China first deployed its fleet to West Africa in 1985, its vessels have become a permanent presence across the world’s oceans. Desperate to meet the nation’s huge demand for seafood, the fleet now boasts 17,000 DWF vessels. To grasp the scale of China’s armada, it is worth noting that the United States operates only about 300 DWF vessels.

China has become a fishing superpower, perhaps the fishing superpower. Yet it has also emerged as the most disruptive force on the seas, whose industrial-scale practices threaten fragile ecosystems, undermine the livelihood of local fishermen in malnourished communities, and serve as an arm of Beijing’s geopolitical influence.

Across the globe, China’s fishing armada has been involved in blatant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities, operating with complete disregard for international agreements, local laws, or the environmental and human costs. 

Consistently ranked as the worst global offender in IUU, the extreme overfishing by Chinese fleets strips the oceans of breeding-age fish populations, leaving fewer fish to reproduce each season and leading to continual reductions the longer the overfishing persists. The fleets are known to utilise bottom trawlers, a method of fishing which is uniquely destructive to the marine ecosystem, as it wrecks the seabed by scouring everything from the ocean floor up in its wake, annihilating local habitats. China’s unsustainable fishing approach includes the routine discarding of commercially worthless bycatch: vast numbers of fish considered of low-market value are caught in the trawler and killed, only to be illegally thrown back into the sea. Perhaps the most glaring example of the environmental devastation wrought by China’s DWF is the deliberate and systematic killing of protected species such as turtles, dolphins, and killer whales.

China’s fishing fleet has become notorious for operating within protected waters and within the EEZ and territorial waters of other nations, typically turning off their Automatic Identification System signal to “go dark” and slip undetected into another nation’s seas without authorisation. More often than not, Chinese fleets enter the territorial waters of developing states, with little regard for how depleted fish populations will impact the dependent local fishing industries or deprive already malnourished populations of a crucial source of food. 

China’s willingness to pillage the EEZs of developing nations presents an existential threat to human security. Local fishermen struggle to compete with its sheer size and scale, leading to far smaller catches: Chinese ships scoop up as many fish in one week as local boats might catch in a year. Not only are fish numbers reduced, but what is left gets taken out of the hands of local industry, leading to losses of hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue. The final insult is that whatever is not shipped back to China for processing is often sold to the desperate communities for a profit. The human cost is apparent: in West Africa, where there are up to 50 million people at risk of food insecurity, communities which rely on local fishing for food or income are being devastated by the presence of Chinese industrial fishing; in South America, squid scarcity due to Chinese overfishing has caused prices to skyrocket, stripping poor families of their traditional source of protein.

The Chinese fleet has also been known to intentionally destroy the fishing nets of local boats and capsize smaller vessels, resulting in destroyed property and drowned fishermen. Typically, the ships themselves are crewed by Chinese captains, while local workers are brought on for manual labour. These workers have been subject to horrific human rights abuses such as debt bondage, confiscation of passports, violence, lack of access to medical care, and severe overworking. Wages are frequently withheld, while in some cases, workers are simply paid in “trash fish”.

Beijing’s brazen lack of respect for the EEZ and territorial waters of other nations has been enabled through its exploitation of weak governance in the developing world, where under-resourced authorities cannot properly police their seas. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ghana, where foreign-owned vessels are barred from fishing, yet 90% of the industrial trawlers in the African nation are controlled by Chinese firms operating through shell Ghanaian ‘front’ companies. In many of the states where China acts as a major source of aid and investment, Beijing has exploited its role to ensure governments take minimal action against its fishing fleet, effectively forcing them to choose between prosecuting Chinese vessels or accepting Chinese aid.

The systematic despoiling of sovereign waters has sparked repeated diplomatic spats. In 2020, an armada of over 350 ships raided the waters near the Galapagos Marine Reserve, causing such alarm to the Ecuadorean government that they requested support from the US Coast Guard. In Argentine waters, a Chinese trawler caught fishing illegally attempted to ram the Argentine Coast Guard before being shot at and sunk. Even this did not deter Chinese fishing operations: a “floating city” comprising mostly Chinese vessels exists just outside of Argentine waters, while repeated incursions into its EEZ have forced Buenos Aires to maintain constant naval surveillance.

Beyond the environmental and humanitarian concerns, Beijing has weaponised its fishing fleet as a powerful tool in its statecraft, an instrument for geopolitical power projection and territorial expansion. The fishing fleet has been used to assert China’s disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea, bolstering Chinese presence in contested waters and aggressively ramming or colliding with ships belonging to rival nations. 

Like all the aforementioned illegal activities perpetrated by the fleet, these actions are incentivised by Beijing through heavy subsidies. Beijing’s objective is clear: deter other Asian states from these waters and consolidate control over strategic waterways. 

Evidently, China’s fishing armada represents an existential threat that spans environmental, humanitarian, and international security dimensions. Not enough has been done by international society to combat the damage caused by the fleet, and unless a concerted effort is made soon, it may be too late to stop the decimation of the environment, the ruin of dependent communities and the onslaught of Chinese territorial ambitions.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/United States Navy (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky)

Licence: US Navy Work (Public domain)

No image changes made.