How Chinese Fishing Vessels Dominate Domestic Waters Across the Globe

On March 14, 2016, in the squid grounds off the coast of Patagonia, a rusty Chinese vessel named the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was fishing illegally, several miles inside Argentine waters. Spotted by an Argentine coast-guard patrol and ordered over the radio to halt, the specially-designed squid-fishing ship, known as a “jigger,” fled the scene. The Argentinians gave chase and fired warning shots. The Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 then tried to ram the coast-guard cutter, prompting it to open fire directly on the jigger, which soon sank. 

Although the violent encounter at sea that day was unusual, the incursion into Argentine waters by a Chinese squid jigger was not. Owned by a state-run behemoth called the China National Fisheries Company, or CNFC, the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was one of several hundred Chinese jiggers that makes annual visits to the high-seas portion of the fishing grounds that lie beyond Argentina’s territory; many of these jiggers then turn off their locational transponders and cross secretly into Argentine waters. Since 2010, the Argentine navy has chased at least 11 Chinese squid vessels out of Argentine waters for suspected illegal fishing, according to the government.

In 2017, a year after the illegal incursion and sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10, Argentina’s Federal Fishing Council issued a little-noticed announcement: it was granting fishing licenses to two foreign vessels that would allow them to operate within Argentine waters. Both would sail under the Argentine flag through a local front company, but their true “beneficial” owner was the CNFC. (The CNFC did not respond to requests for comment.)

The move by local authorities may have been a contradiction, but it is an increasingly common one in Argentina—and elsewhere around the world. Over the past three decades, China has gained supremacy over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 distant-water ships, a fleet that is more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet. When it came to targeting other countries’ waters, Chinese fishing ships typically sat “on the outside,” parking in international waters along sea borders, then running incursions across the line into domestic waters. But in recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has increasingly taken a “softer” approach, gaining control from the inside by paying to “flag-in” their ships so they can fish in domestic waters. Subtler than simply entering foreign coastal areas to fish illegally, the tactic is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels. 

While many nations have laws that require vessels fishing in their waters to be locally owned—with the aim of keeping profits in the country and making it easier to enforce fishing regulations—China has found ways around them. Chinese companies partner with locals, or even sell or lease their ships to them, but retain control over decisions and profits. Or they buy their way into local waters with “access agreements.”

Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial squid-fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag, which constitutes most of the country’s squid fleet. Many of these companies have been tied to a variety of crimes, including dumping fish at sea, turning off their transponders, and engaging in tax evasion and fraud. Trade records show that much of what is caught by these vessels is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to countries including the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain. China now operates almost 250 of these flagged-in vessels globally, including ones that operate off the coasts of Micronesia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and Iran.

A four-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project into the global seafood supply chain—which entailed reporting at sea on several ships, including to the waters of Argentina, the Falkland Islands, near Korea and the Galapagos Islands—has for the first time revealed the true size of this hidden fleet, along with the extent of the fleet’s illegal behavior, concentration in certain foreign waters, and the amount of seafood from these ships that winds up in European and American markets. 

“Most national fisheries require vessels to be owned locally to keep profits within the country and make it easier to enforce fishing regulations,” said Duncan Copeland, the former executive director of Trygg Mat Tracking, a non-profit research organization specializing in maritime crime. “Flagging-in undermines those aims.” 

China has not hidden how this approach factors into larger ambitions. In an academic paper published in 2023, Chinese fishery officials and representatives from Zhejiang Ocean Family explained how they have relied extensively on Chinese companies, for example, to penetrate Argentina’s territorial waters through “leasing and transfer methods,” and how this is part of a global policy. 

Experts said the decision by the Argentine government to flag in Chinese-owned vessels after the sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 confused them, given Argentine regulations that not only forbid foreign-owned ships from flying Argentina’s flag or fishing in its waters, but also prohibit the granting of fishing licenses to ship operators with records of illegal fishing in Argentine waters. Eduardo Pucci, a former Argentine fisheries minister, called it “a total contradiction.”

The trend is especially pronounced in Africa, where Chinese companies operate flagged-in ships in the national waters of at least nine countries on the continent—among them, notably, Ghana, where more than 135 Chinese fishing ships flying the Ghanaian flag are fishing in national waters, even though foreign investment in fishing is technically illegal. Nonetheless, up to 95 percent of Ghana’s industrial trawling fleet has some element of Chinese control, according to a 2018 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, an advocacy group, the most recent available figures. 

China has also replaced fishing vessels from the European Union, right on its doorstep, in the waters of Morocco. In the recent past, dozens of vessels, most of them from Spain, fished with the permission of the Moroccan government inside the African country’s exclusive economic zone. The agreement lapsed, however, in 2023 and China now operates at least six flagged-in vessels in Moroccan waters. China has also established a growing presence across the Pacific Ocean. Chinese ships comb the waters of Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, having flagged-in or signed access agreements with those countries, according to a report released in 2022 by the Congressional Research Service in the U.S. 

“Chinese fleets are active in waters far from China’s shores,” the report warned, “and the growth in their harvests threatens to worsen the already dire depletion in global fisheries.” 

As global demand for seafood has doubled since the 1960s, the appetite for fish has outpaced what can be sustainably caught. Now, more than a third of the world's stocks have been overfished, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations ( FAO). To feed the demand, the proliferation of foreign industrial fishing ships, especially from China, risks depleting domestic fish stocks of countries in the global south while also jeopardizing local livelihoods and compromising food security by exporting an essential source of protein. Western consumers, particularly in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, are beneficiaries of this cheap and seemingly abundant seafood caught or processed by China.

“Illegal fishing and abusive fishing takes away from communities that survive on the same fish,” says Dyhia Belhabib, a principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada, a charity focused on environmental activism. “This means that their current and future economic prospects from this very valuable resource are being destroyed and their food resources depleted.”

But ocean sustainability and food security are by no means the only concerns tied to the growth of China’s control of global seafood and penetration into foreign near-shore waters. Labor abuses and other crimes are a widespread problem with Chinese fishing ships.

In the past six years, more than 50 ships flagged to a dozen different countries but controlled by Chinese companies have engaged in crimes such as illegal fishing, forced labor, and unauthorized transhipment, or transfers of catch at sea to carrier ships that transfer it back to shore, according to the investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project. In one instance, a fisheries observer from Ghana went missing while working on the vessel. Four of the vessels showed a pattern of repeatedly turning off their automated tracking systems for longer than a day at a time while out on the Pacific, often at the edge of an exclusive economic zone. Vessels “going dark” is a risk factor for illegal fishing and transshipment, marine researchers say, because it makes it harder for law enforcement to comprehensively track a vessel’s movement or see if it may have engaged with other ships at sea. 

For most of the past decade, one dead body has been dropped off every other month on average in the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, mostly from Chinese squid ships, according to the Outlaw Ocean Project’s research. Some of the workers on these ships have died from beriberi, an easily avoidable and reversible form of malnutrition caused by a B1 vitamin deficiency that experts say is a warning sign of criminal neglect, typically caused on ships by eating too much white rice or instant noodles, which lack the vitamin. At least 24 workers on 14 Chinese fishing ships suffered symptoms associated with beriberi between 2013 and 2021, according to the investigation. Of those, at least 15 died. The investigation also reported dozens of cases of forced labor, wage theft, violence, the confiscation of passports and deprivation of medical care.

Many of these crimes have taken place on the high seas, beyond any country’s territorial jurisdiction. But increasingly, Chinese-owned vessels are fishing in the local waters of nations where policing is sporadic at best, as governments lack the finances, the coast-guard vessels, or the political will to board and spot-check the ships.

In January 2019, as part of the four-year investigation, a team of reporters from The Outlaw Ocean Project boarded a Chilean fishing ship in Punta Arenas, Chile, where the crew recounted recently watching a Chinese captain on a nearby squid ship punching and slapping deckhands. Later that year, the same team of journalists was reporting at sea off the coast of the West African nation of Gambia, where they boarded a Chinese ship called the Victory 205. There they found six African crew members sleeping on sea-soaked foam mattresses in a cramped and dangerously hot crawl space above the engine room of the ship, which was soon detained by local authorities for these labor and other violations. (Owners of the Victory 205 did not respond to a request for comment.)

In February 2022, the Outlaw Ocean Project reporters boarded a Chinese squid jigger on the high seas near the Falkland Islands, where an 18-year-old Chinese deckhand nervously begged to be rescued, explaining that his and the rest of the workers’ passports had been confiscated. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” he asked. Roughly four months later, the reporting team climbed onto another Chinese fishing ship in international waters near the Galapagos Islands to document living conditions. As if in suspended animation, the crew of 30 men wore thousand-yard stares. Their teeth were yellowed from smoking, their skin ashen, and their hands spongy from handling fresh squid. The walls and floors were covered in a slippery ooze of squid ink. The deckhands said they worked 15-hour days, 6 days per week. Mostly, they stood shin deep in squid, monitoring the reels to ensure they did not jam, and tossing their catch into overflowing baskets for later sorting. Below deck, a cook stirred instant noodles and bits of squid in a rice cooker. He said the vessel had run out of vegetables and fruit—a common cause at sea of fatal malnutrition.

In June 2023, the same reporters were contacted by Uruguayan authorities seeking help after a local woman stumbled across a message in a bottle, washed ashore, apparently thrown from a Chinese squidder. “I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765 and I was locked up by the company,” the message said. “When you see this paper, please help me call the police! Help, help.” When contacted for comment, the ship’s owner Qingdao Songhai Fishery said that Uruguayan police had looked into the matter and concluded that the message “was completely fabricated by individual crew members.” 

Jorge Frias, the president of the Argentine fishing captains’ union, explains that on Argentine-flagged ships, the Chinese call the shots. The captains are Argentinians, but “fishing masters,” who are Chinese, decide where to go and when, he says.

The case of Manuel Quiquinte is illustrative. In the Spring of 2021, Quiquinte, an Argentinian crew member on a squid jigger called the Xin Shi Ji 89, contracted Covid while at sea. Owned by the Chinese, the ship was flagged to Argentina and jigging in Argentinian waters. Its crew was a mix of Argentinian and Chinese workers. Several days after Quiquinte fell ill, the Argentine captain called the Chinese owners to ask if the ship could go to shore in Argentina to get medical care. According to court testimony from another crew member, the company officials said no, and to keep fishing. Quiquinte died on the ship shortly thereafter, in May. 

When contacted by the Outlaw Ocean Project about the death, the vessel’s parent company Zhejiang Ocean Family said that the crew member had tested negative for COVID-19 prior to working on board but had indeed contracted the illness on the vessel and died after his condition deteriorated rapidly. Ocean Family said the vessel belonged to a local Argentine company which Ocean Family has invested in (and which it did not identify), and it was this local company which handled the situation.

To help create jobs, make money and feed its growing middle class, the Chinese government heavily supports its fishing industry with billions of dollars in subsidies for things like fuel, ship building, or engine purchases. The Chinese fishing companies flagging into poorer countries’ waters are also eligible for these subsidies. “The reason why the Chinese subsidize these fleets could be not only for the fish,”  said Fernando Rivera, chairman of the Argentine Fishing Industry Chamber. “It has a very important geopolitical aspect.”

As U.S. and European fishing fleets and navies have shrunk, so too has Western development funding and market investment in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific. This has created a void that China is filling as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global development program. Between 2000 and 2020, China’s trade with Latin America and the Caribbean grew from $12 billion to $315 billion, according to the World Economic Forum. 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, China has at times received exclusive access to a wide range of resources, from oil fields to lithium mines. 

The maritime domain is an important front in China’s growth plans, which include exerting power not just over the high seas and contested waters like those in the South China Sea, but also consolidating control over shipping, fishing in foreign coastal waters, and ports abroad. Chinese companies now operate dozens of overseas processing plants and cold-storage facilities, and terminals in more than 90 foreign fishing or shipping ports abroad, according to research by Kardon. 

Though most of these business ventures go unnoticed, some of them have sparked controversy. Starting in 2007, China extended more than a billion dollars worth of loans to Sri Lanka as part of a plan for a Chinese state-owned company named the China Ocean Shipping Company Group to build a port and an airport. The deal was made based on the promise that the project would generate more than enough revenue for Sri Lanka to pay back these loans. By 2017, however, the port and airport had not recouped the debt, and Sri Lanka had no way to pay back the loan. China struck a new deal extending credit further. The deal gave China majority control over the port and the surrounding area for 99 years. 

In 2018, a Chinese company named Shandong Baoma purchased a 70 acre plot of land in Montevideo, Uruguay, to build a “megaport” consisting of two half-mile-long docks, a tax-exempt “free-trade zone,” a new ice factory, a ship-repair warehouse, a fuel depot, and dorms for staff. The plan was eventually canceled after local protests, but the Uruguayan government later announced that it would build the port itself, with foreign investment, and China’s ambassador in Uruguay, Wang Gang, expressed interest in managing the project. 

More recently, in May 2021, Sierra Leone signed an agreement with China to build a new fishing harbor and fishmeal processing factory on a beach near a national park. In response, local organizations pushed for more transparency around the deal, which they said would harm the area’s biodiversity, according to a 2023 report by The Stimson Center.

In Argentina, China has made or promised billions of dollars in currency swaps and investments, providing a crucial lifeline amid skyrocketing domestic inflation and growing hesitancy from international investors. For Beijing, this money has bought political influence. After the Argentine coast guard sank the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 in 2016, all 29 crew members were rescued from the water, and all but four of them were immediately taken back to China. The captain and three others were rescued by the coast guard, brought to shore, charged with a range of crimes, and put under house arrest.

The judge handling the case initially justified the charges filed. The Chinese officers had placed “both the life and property of the Chinese vessel itself and the personnel and ship of the Argentine Prefecture at risk,” he said. But China’s foreign ministry soon pushed back. Three days later, Argentina’s foreign minister told reporters that the charges had “provoked a reaction of great concern from the Chinese government” and that she had reassured China that Argentina would follow local and international laws. Several weeks later, in April, the Argentine judiciary also fell in line, releasing the captain and the three other sailors without penalty to be flown back to China. By May, Argentina’s foreign minister was on a plane to Beijing to meet with the Chinese foreign minister.

The scourge of illegal fishing and overfishing did not originate with China, of course. Western industrial fleets dominated the world’s oceans for much of the 20th century, fishing unsustainably in ways that have helped cause the current crisis, explained Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. 

China's expansionist methods are also not historically unique. The U.S. has a long and infamous record of intervening abroad when foreign leaders begin erecting highly protectionist laws. In the past several decades, the tactic of “flagging in” has also been used by American and Icelandic fishing companies. More recently, as China has increased its control over global fishing, the U.S. and European nations have jumped at the opportunity to focus international attention on China’s misdeeds. 

Still, China has a well-documented reputation for violating international fishing laws and standards, bullying other ships, intruding on the maritime territory of other countries and abusing its fishing workers. In 2021, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a nonprofit research group, ranked China as the world’s biggest purveyor of illegal fishing. But frequent culprits can also be easy scapegoats: a country that regularly flouts norms and breaks the law can also at times be a victim of misinformation. When criticized in the media, China typically pushes back, not without reason, by dismissing the criticism as politically motivated and by accusing its detractors of hypocrisy.

China’s sheer size, global reach, and poor track record on labor and marine conservation is raising concerns. In Africa, for instance, Chinese trawlers catch 100,000 metric tons of fish each year just from Ghanian waters, and the country’s fishing stocks are now in crisis, as local fishermen’s incomes have dropped by up to 40 percent over the last decade. “Fishing vessel owners and operators exploit African flags to escape effective oversight and to fish unsustainably and illegally both in sovereign African waters,” wrote TMT, the nonprofit that tracks maritime crime, adding that the companies were creating “a situation where they can harness the resources of a State without any meaningful restrictions or management oversight.” In the Pacific, an inspection in 2024 by local police and the U.S. Coast Guard found that six Chinese flagged-in ships fishing in the waters of Vanuatu had violated regulations requiring them to record the amount of fish they catch.

And in South America, the increasingly foreign presence in territorial waters is stoking nationalist worry in places like Peru and Argentina. “China is becoming the only player, by displacing local companies or purchasing them,” said Mr. Miranda, the former Peruvian minister. Pablo Isasa, a captain of an Argentinian hake trawler, added: “We have the enemy inside and out.”

Several major studies have shown that China is not only the biggest player in the global seafood industry, but also the largest purveyor of illegal fishing. On the high seas, there is little-to-no law enforcement, which allows the Chinese fleet to dip into waters where they are not authorized and to use prohibited techniques that can give them an edge — and which makes the myriad human-rights abuses committed on China’s fishing vessels practically invisible.

All of this contributes to an accelerating pace of unsustainable fishing around the world. After years of similar behavior from Western nations, including the U.S. and Europe, China is leading the way in fishing species to near extinction. The fleet also operates the world’s largest collection of bottom trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, destroying coral reefs and other marine life.

Most marine conservationists and researchers agree that with a third of all fish stocks at the edge or beyond the point of collapse, the trend of overfishing must be reversed, as it threatens not only ocean health, but also global food security and human rights. As stocks decline, driving competition, companies face increasing pressure to cut corners in their fishing practices, which can often lead to the use of forced labor and other human rights crimes. Researchers and advocates recommend scaling back the size of global fishing fleets; tightening the quotas that limit how many fish can be pulled from the water; removing the government subsidies that make seafood artificially cheap; and for companies to take further steps to monitor their supply chains. If this does not happen, according to these experts, environmental degradation and human rights abuses will continue to worsen.

The superpower of seafood, China is unequivocally the most important global actor on the high seas today, but it also plays an outsized role in foreign waters. Better control of the hundreds of industrial Chinese fishing ships in the national waters of poorer, global South countries will be an important part of any plan to protect the oceans.

(This story was produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project with reporting contributed by Maya Martin, Jake Conley, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Teresa Tomassoni. Bellingcat also contributed reporting.)