Mick Hartley

I've written a couple of posts recently about Chinese boats fishing illegally in North Korean waters, and the resulting skirmishes with North Koreans. According to this Slate article by Ian Urbina – How China’s Massive Fishing Fleet Is Transforming the World’s Oceans – the problem of aggressive Chinese fishing goes much further than North Korea:

With anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 boats, some as far afield as Argentina, China is unmatched in the size and reach of its fishing armada. Fueled primarily by government subsidies, its growth and activities have largely gone unchecked, in part because China itself has historically had few rules governing fishing operations. The dominance and global ubiquity of this fleet raise broader questions about how China has put so many boats on the water, and what it means for the world’s oceans.

China’s fishing fleet is more than just a commercial concern; it acts as a projection of geopolitical power on the world’s oceans. As the U.S. Navy has pulled back from the waters of West Africa and the Middle East, China has bolstered its fishing and naval presence. And in places such as the South China Sea and the Arctic’s Northern Sea Route, China has laid claim to prized shipping lanes as well as subsea oil and gas deposits.

“The scale and aggressiveness of its fleet puts China in control,” says Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding that few foreign countries have been willing to push back when China’s fishing boats make incursions into their national waters.

Not that the fishing itself is unimportant. The fleet is also a way to obtain food security for China’s 1.4 billion people. Many of the marine stocks closest to China’s shores have dwindled from overfishing and industrialization, so ships are forced to venture farther to fill their nets. The Chinese government says it has roughly 2,600 distant-water fishing vessels, which, according to a recent report by the Stimson Center, a security research group, makes it three times larger than the fleets of the next top four countries—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Spain—combined. […]

One of the reasons China’s fleet is so bloated is that some of its fishing ships serve purposes other than merely fishing. Part of a so-called civilian militia, Poling says, these fishing vessels are dispatched to conflict zones at sea to surveil the waters and occasionally to intimidate and ram fishing or law enforcement boats from other countries. Separate from its fishing subsidies, China has a program that incentivizes boats to operate in disputed waters in the South China Sea as a way to assert China’s claims. They get many of the same benefits as the distant-water fleet, plus cash payments because operating in that region is otherwise unprofitable.

It's all very depressing.