They sweep the sea in 400-ship swarms: Chinese fishing boats that—based on time of year and fishery—include trawlers, purse seiners, gill-netters, pole-and-line platforms, squid jiggers, tuna longliners, wood-hulled freighters, and sail-masted junks.
The fleet is shepherded by oil tankers, supply barges, “research” vessels, and hospital ships, shadowed by Chinese navy warships and coast guard cutters, and serviced by massive motherships with 500,000 cubic feet of frozen storage holds.
Rotating motherships ferry harvests to China and return with provisions on a continuous cycle so that the fleet can keep fishing until there are no more fish and it must move on to keep fishing until there are no more fish in the new areas across the globe, from Senegal to the South Pacific.
Chinese fishing armadas are becoming common and long-lingering sights in international waters just beyond 200-mile national exclusive economic zones (EEZ) off the African and South American coasts and across the vast central and western Pacific, including off—and allegedly in—the sovereign waters of Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands, which are U.S. territories.
Marauding Chinese fishing boats have destroyed domestic commercial industries and damaged sports-fishing businesses across the Pacific, island leaders told a U.S. congressional panel during meetings and field hearings staged on Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, Palau, and Micronesia from Aug. 23 to 28.
Leaders from the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) joined territorial government officials in citing illegal fishing by swarming Chinese boats as part of a “political warfare” pattern of economic coercion, subversion, harassment, and overt threats orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to sow discord among local governments, businesses, and civic groups across the Pacific in a persistent effort to drive a wedge between them and the United States.
“Palau has closed off our waters to commercial fishing because it’s just too impossible to regulate,” Republic of Palau Minister of Finance Kaleb Udui testified during the field hearing. Thus, the island country has had to forgo revenues from selling fishing licenses to foreign vessels inside its EEZ outside of the globally prized Palau National Marine Sanctuary.
Island leaders told the nine-member Indo-Pacific Task Force panel that Chinese fishing fleets—whether by official CCP policy or by indifference—are force-multipliers for organized crime, especially in smuggling and human trafficking activities, while they also provide cover for Chinese military surveillance, sabotage, and cyber intrusions against infrastructure and U.S. military installations.
None of this should be a surprise, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said.
“There are so many things that we could point to that the Chinese Communist Party is doing to suppress other people when they don’t get their way. The suppression of human rights and political rights in Hong Kong, genocide against the Uighur population in western China, theft of international intellectual property, and debt diplomacy,” Mr. Lamborn said.
“And then there’s illegal fishing,” he said, calling the methodical plundering of fish stocks a food security challenge being imposed by the CCP on nations reliant on aquaculture and a direct repudiation of their—and the United States’—sovereignty, fearing sooner or later, Chinese boats aggressively muscling into “combat fisheries” will ignite a shooting war.
US to Boost Maritime Monitoring
The task force hearings were conducted as proposed Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with the FSM, RMI, and Palau await congressional approval in September.The pacts, renewed every 20 years, are part of the Biden administration’s Pacific Partnership Strategy, which calls for “renewed U.S. engagement across the full Pacific Islands region” to counter China’s efforts “at democratic erosion.”
The administration submitted the proposed compacts to Congress in June after deliberations during the Trump administration stalled with the three freely associated states. The agreements are set to be enacted when the federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.
The Biden administration’s proposed compacts earmark $7.1 billion in economic assistance during the two-decade span for the three island nations, with $3.3 billion appropriated for the FSM—a $1.2 billion increase from its 2003 COFA—and $2.3 billion appropriated for the RMI—a $1.3 billion increase from its 2003 COFA.
In exchange, the pacts make the island countries strategic allies. The agreements deny area access to Pentagon-decreed adversaries and allow the Department of Defense to maintain key installations and operational ranges within their borders.
A key component of the renewed pacts is the United States’ pledge to assist in policing EEZ waters with a boosted U.S. Coast Guard presence that will include joint operations and “ship rider” programs in which marine enforcement officials from host jurisdictions can direct patrols to where violations are suspected.
That $60 million annual effort also boosts the number of FBI agents, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Fisheries agents, forensic auditors, tax investigators, and, of course, attorneys—sea lawyers, literally—to assist the Pacific nations in defending their fisheries on the waters, in the courts, and in the “political war’s” forum of public opinion.
The administration maintains that industrial overfishing encourages forced labor, human trafficking, and drug smuggling, and “undermine U.S. economic competitiveness, national security, fisheries sustainability, and the livelihoods and human rights of fishers around the world.”
Among initiatives launched by the United States is the creation of an IUU (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated) Fishing Action Alliance with the UK and Canada to coordinate “urgent action to improve the monitoring, control, and surveillance of fisheries, increase transparency in fishing fleets and in the seafood market, and build new partnerships that will hold bad actors accountable.”
The United States has also established an Interagency Working Group on IUU fishing, made up of 21 federal agencies, to develop five-year plans for protecting fisheries with participating partners from Ecuador, Panama, Senegal, Taiwan, Vietnam, and across the Pacific—all with fisheries episodically besieged by swarms of Chinese fishing boats that ignore most international fishery agreements and demonstrate little concern beyond their daily catch about the long-term sustainability of fisheries.
Invisible Armada of ‘Dark’ Ships
Having severely depleted the stocks in its own coastal waters, over the past decade, the CCP is dispatching its fishing industry across the oceans of the world, especially off West Africa or Latin America where enforcement is weaker, where national and local governments lack resources or inclination to police waters.China’s distant-water fishing fleet features A-framed trawlers that slowly pair-net 300-foot-wide swaths of the sea, catching more fish in a single sweep than subsistence fishermen catch in a lifetime, or than domestic fishing ships catch in a month.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there were an estimated 4.1 million commercial fishing vessels on the planet in 2022, with two-thirds registered in Asian nations and 2.5 million capable of distant-water fishing over long distances and times.
While Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Russia are among the nations that subsidize domestic commercial distant-water fishing industries, since the dawn of this century, China has built the world’s largest fishing fleet, dwarfing all others.
Harvesting half the world’s annual reported catch, China is the world’s biggest seafood exporter, while consuming more than a third of all fish reported caught each year, according to the U.N.
China’s annual take of the reported global fishery harvest has dramatically increased over the past two decades, since the collapse of China’s domestic fishery and South China Sea fish stocks.
During that time, the CCP has amassed a modern, high-tech, industrial armada aided by automation, geospatial satellites, and the exploitative mastery of marine sciences to operate at sea-vacuuming efficiencies, devastating fisheries in its wake.
Estimates on the size of China’s fishing industry vary from 200,000 to 800,000 commercial ships, according to the FAO, which places its own estimate at 564,000 ships, making it, far and away, the world’s largest.
But fewer than 2,700 of those ships are registered as deep-water fishing-capable vessels; the CCP is widely believed to be underreporting that number.
By comparison, the United States’ distant-water fishing fleet has fewer than 300 vessels.
This fleet—on paper—has been reduced by nearly half since 2013, when there were more than 1 million Chinese fishing vessels operating around the world.
But the fleet on paper is different than the one that shows up off foreign nations’ EEZs. Critics and observers such as Global Fishing Watch and Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which track fishing ship transponders, describe it as “an invisible armada.”
According to state agencies and fisheries biologists across four oceans, Chinese fishing fleets are notorious for using satellite-guided navigation to hug but rarely enter or operate in EEZs. At least, that is, when the ships—those with them—keep their transponders on.
Global Fishing Watch is among the groups that allege that many Chinese fishing ships go “dark” for extensive spans, making them invisible on radar.
As a result, a significant component of China’s fishery harvest is likely unreported, and much of these illicit harvests likely come from inside other nations’ territorial waters, maritime officials and biologists say.
Encroaching on other nations’ exclusive enterprise zones, sweeping the seas with nets that ensnare endangered species, and overfishing already stressed fisheries are among the dangers posed by China’s fishing fleets.
China’s commercial fishing fleets serve as de-facto paramilitary forces, activities that the CCP can frame as private actions that provide cover for accompanying research ships that prospect for minerals, oil, and other natural resources, and for military intelligence operatives.
The fishing fleets are a “civilian militia” that function as “a non-uniformed, unprofessional force without proper training and outside of the frameworks of international maritime law, the military rules of engagement, or the multilateral mechanisms set up to prevent unsafe incidents at sea,” Greg Poling wrote in a Foreign Policy column.
Most Wanted: US Coast Guard
All of this makes the U.S. Coast Guard a much-wanted commodity across the Pacific and a key component in the island-nation compacts.The Coast Guard’s sprawling 14th District spans more than 14 million square miles with stations on the islands of Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and Hawaii in Hawaii, and four cutters—soon to be five—stationed at Santa Rita on Guam to patrol more than 2 million miles of the western Pacific.
The Coast Guard ships have been conducting six-week, 8,000-mile patrols from the South China Sea to the central Pacific, and their presence is assuring, Ms. Barnes said.
“Guam is the hub of the Pacific and one way to demonstrate this is the jurisdiction of Coast Guard Sector Guam,” she said. “The men and women of the Coast Guard pride themselves on being a ‘force for good,’ and the results speak for themselves.
“The impact that the Coast Guard has on the region is something that the entire ‘Blue Continent’ takes to heart, whether it be preventing boats of our enemies from entering Guam and our neighbors illegally, or the countless successful critical search-and-rescue operations, I urge each one of you here today to consider furthering their capabilities here in Guam.”
“We see it in massive investments in infrastructure and economic development. We see it in land grabs and fisheries expansions. We see it in unauthorized research vessels and divers lurking around our undersea fiber optic cables. We see it in organized crime, public corruption, and political interference,” he said, adding “there is a strategic edge” in how the fishing fleets operate.
FSM Acting Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ricky Cantero said his island nation “appreciates the support it has received from the U.S. Coast Guard” in protecting its waters from illegal fishing and especially the expanded ship-rider program.
“The support that we get from your side, especially from the U.S. Coast Guard, is very, very critical,” he said, noting that FSM officials “just went through an annual joint committee meeting with your military.”
“We do it on an annual basis. And we review the strategic posturing in this region. And one of the issues that we always discuss is, how do we counter illegal fishing. And that’s one of the primary reasons why we agreed to the expanded ship-rider agreement,” Mr. Cantero said.
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) said the angst isn’t just about overfishing.
“These actions show that China not only disrespects the sovereignty of these islands, but it is a significant national and international security threat.”
