China now reigns supreme over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 ships, a flotilla more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet, according to a report by the Outlaw Ocean Project.
Research by the environmental nonprofit based in Washington shows that more than one-third of the world’s seafood stocks have been overfished, largely because of Beijing’s “industrial-scale efforts” to harvest fish, squid, shrimp, and other shellfish from the world’s oceans.
The project’s report reads: “To feed the demand, the proliferation of foreign industrial fishing ships, especially from China, risks collapsing domestic fish stocks of countries in the global south while also jeopardizing local livelihoods and compromising food security.
“Western consumers, particularly in Europe, the United States, and Canada, are beneficiaries of this cheap and seemingly abundant seafood caught or processed by China.”
China has a reputation for violating international fishing laws and standards, pressuring other ships, intruding on the maritime territory of other countries, and abusing its fishing workers.
Outlaw Ocean Project Director Ian Urbina, who co-authored the report, said recently that Chinese vessels operated mainly along sea borders while making “occasional incursions” into domestic waters.
Now China is taking a “softer” approach, he told The Epoch Times.
“It’s gaining control of fishing grounds from the inside by paying to flag-in its ships so they can fish in domestic waters,” he said.
Flagging-in involves the use of business partnerships to register Chinese ships under the flag of another country, allowing those vessels to fish in that nation’s territorial waters.
“This means the Chinese vessels don’t have to enter foreign coastal areas to fish illegally,“ Urbina said. ”The flagging-in tactic is often legal. It doesn’t cause scandal for Beijing, but it ultimately results in the same depletion of seafood stocks and environmental destruction.”
China is “buying its way into restricted national fishing grounds” from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, he said.
Project investigator Pete McKenzie recounted a recent example involving Argentina.
“Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial squid-fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag. This constitutes most of Argentina’s entire squid fleet,” he told The Epoch Times.
McKenzie said many of these companies have been linked to crimes, including dumping fish at sea, turning off their transponders to keep from being tracked, tax evasion, and fraud.
“We’ve examined trade records, and they show that much of what’s caught by flagged-in Chinese ships is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to American and European markets,” he said.
The research revealed that China now operates almost 250 flagged-in vessels in the waters of countries including Ghana, Kenya, Iran, Micronesia, and Morocco.
“The scale and scope of China’s armada is significant because most countries require vessels to be owned locally to keep profits within the country and make it easier to enforce fishing regulations,” McKenzie said.
Tim Walker, head of maritime security at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, said flagging-in undermines countries’ food security, sovereignty, and finances.
He said China’s massive fleet of industrial fishing ships also runs contrary to Beijing’s conservation goals.
In 2017, after pressure from environmental groups about overfishing, China announced that it would limit the size of its distant-water fleet to 3,000 vessels, according to Walker.
“But now China has thousands more industrial seafood processing ships that fly the flags of other countries that fish in waters belonging to those countries,” he told The Epoch Times.
Walker said China’s flagging-in strategy was especially prevalent in waters surrounding Africa, where poor countries rely on the extra income from Chinese fishing companies.
According to the Outlaw Ocean Project, Chinese companies operate flagged-in ships in the national waters of at least nine countries on the continent, most notably Ghana.
Its report states that at least 70 Chinese vessels flying the Ghanaian flag are fishing in the West African country’s waters, even though foreign investment in fishing is illegal in Ghana.
This fleet catches more than 100,000 metric tons of fish each year, and Ghana’s fishing stocks are now in crisis, with local fishermen’s incomes having fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation.
Urbina said China has also replaced fishing vessels from the European Union that were operating in the waters of Morocco.
He said dozens of ships, mostly from Spain, have fished with the permission of the Moroccan government inside the African country’s exclusive economic zone.
When the agreement ended in 2023, said Urbina, China moved in and now runs at least six flagged-in vessels in Moroccan waters.
An investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project revealed that in the past six years, more than 50 ships bearing the flag of a dozen different countries but controlled by Chinese companies engaged in crimes such as illegal fishing, unauthorized trans-shipments, and forced labor.
Trans-shipment is a maritime term for the illegal transfer of a catch from one vessel to another.
The report also details the disappearance of an official for Ghana’s Fisheries Commission, Emmanuel Essien, from the Meng Xin 15, owned by the Chinese company Dalian Meng Xin Ocean Fisheries, on the night of July 5, 2019.
Essien went missing two weeks after he provided police with video evidence of crew members on another Chinese ship transferring their catch illegally between it and a second vessel.
Milko Schvartzman, one of the project’s lead investigators, said ships operated by Chinese companies “show a pattern of repeatedly turning off their automated tracking systems for longer than a day at a time.”
“When vessels ‘go dark,’ it often indicates illegal fishing and trans-shipment because it makes it harder for law enforcement to track a vessel’s movement or see if it’s engaged with other ships at sea,” Schvartzman told The Epoch Times.
Walker said the Chinese regime subsidizes its fishing industry with billions of dollars to create jobs, generate profits, and feed an expanding middle class.
“The Chinese firms that are flagging into the waters of other countries also qualify for these annual subsidies,” he said. “Their presence in foreign waters also has a strong geopolitical motive.”
As U.S. and European fishing fleets and navies have shrunk, so has Western development funding and market investment in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific, the project’s report noted.
Schvartzman said this has created a void that China is filling as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global development program.
He pointed to Latin America and the Caribbean.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), China’s trade with these regions increased to $315 billion from $12 billion between 2000 and 2020.
The WEF stated that China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, two major state-owned Chinese banks, provided $137 billion in loans to Latin American governments between 2005 and 2020.
In exchange, according to Walker, China has sometimes received exclusive access to a wide range of resources—from oil fields to lithium mines or fishing grounds.
Urbina said the maritime domain is an important front in China’s growth plans.
“These include exerting power over the high seas and contested waters like those in the South China Sea and also consolidating control over shipping, fishing in foreign coastal waters, and ports abroad,” he said.
The Outlaw Ocean Project report states that Chinese companies now operate dozens of overseas processing plants, cold-storage facilities, and terminals in more than 90 foreign fishing or shipping ports.
“China’s appetite for expansion and exploitation of natural resources shows no sign of slowing down, and I’m concerned we’re past the point of no return,” Walker said.
