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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription.  _This content was paid for and prepared by China Daily, an official publication of the People's Republic of China. The TIME editorial and advertising departments were not involved in the creation of this content._ Black-headed gulls hover above the Yangtze River where a shoal of fish gather at Hejiangmen Square in Yibin last year, where the Minjiang River meets the Jinsha River. LAN FENG / FOR CHINA DAILY By PENG CHAO Over the past five years, Tang Shengrong has spent almost every day by the Yangtze River. What excites her most is seeing more and bigger fish in its waters. “Five years ago, you could barely see any fish in the river. Later, groups of small fish appeared. Now, you may come across big ones weighing 77 to 88 pounds — about this long,” she said, stretching her arms wide to demonstrate. Tang, 53, is an assistant patroller in the city of Yibin on the upper reaches of the Yangtze in Southwest China’s Sichuan province. Born into a fishing family, she became a fisherwoman at 19, until a national fishing ban came into effect on Asia’s longest river in 2020. In January of that year, China began a decade-long fishing moratorium in 332 conservation areas along the 3,915-mile Yangtze. Starting on Jan. 1 the following year, the ban was expanded to the entirety of the river’s main channel and key tributaries, as well as to large lakes in the Yangtze River Basin such as Poyang and Dongting. The ban aims to help the river recover from dwindling aquatic resources and degraded biodiversity due to years of overfishing. Yibin is known as the “first city along the Yangtze,” as the river’s two major tributaries — the Jinsha River and the Minjiang River — come together in the city’s downtown area to form Changjiang, or Yangtze as it is known in English. As of July 2020, all 1,186 fishers in Yibin had packed away their rods and nets. To facilitate their transition to new livelihoods, the local government offered them compensation packages, along with free entrepreneurship and employment training and subsidized startup loans. The transition wasn’t easy. “My husband and I felt completely lost for a period of time,” Tang said. “Having fished for decades, what else could we possibly do?” A few months later, on hearing that the local fisheries administration was recruiting former fishers as assistant patrollers, she breathed a sigh of relief. “The Yangtze raised me, and now it’s time for me to do something for it,” she said. After passing tests for physical fitness, swimming skills and literacy, Tang and three family members — her husband, younger brother and his wife — became members of the local fishery patrol team. Their mission involves daily patrols along the river to curb illegal fishing, sewage discharge, littering and other activities that could harm the aquatic ecosystem. Hejiangmen, one of Tang’s patrol sites where the Jinsha and Minjiang rivers converge to form the Yangtze, has become a popular tourist spot as large schools of wild fish are usually visible there. “Many beautiful waterbirds have come. Some weren’t even seen here when I was young,” she said. In Yibin, 75 former fishers have joined 12 fishery patrol teams. With their involvement, the ecological restoration of the stretch of the Yangtze in Yibin has achieved remarkable results. Monitoring data shows that water quality in the Yibin section of the Yangtze’s main channel has consistently remained at Grade II level — the second highest in China’s five-tier surface water quality grading system. According to Yibin’s fishery administration, the number of fish species found in the local stretch of the Yangtze has rebounded from 48 in 2019 to 92 last year, with increasingly frequent sightings of endangered species such as the Yangtze sturgeon. Unlike Tang, former fisher Wang Mingjun chose an entirely different career path — running a homestay. The 42-year-old is satisfied with his new profession — he now earns around 120,000 to 130,000 yuan ($16,707 to 18,099) a year, far more than in the past. In the second half of 2019, when Yibin’s Cuiping district took the lead in Sichuan in helping fishers move ashore, he was among the first to quit fishing. With cash compensation and a subsidized startup loan, Wang transformed his residence in Yongsheng village in Yibin’s Lizhuang township into a homestay. He credits his newfound success in this unfamiliar industry to the free homestay operation and management training provided by the local government. “I attended a 20-day training program, from guest services to room maintenance and interior decoration, all completely free of charge,” he said. Cuan Zongqiang, town official of Lizhuang, said that while enforcing the fishing ban, the town has strengthened riverbank protection and its sewage treatment capacity. “These efforts created opportunities for former fishers and other local residents to develop tourism-related businesses,” he said. “Practice has proven that ecological conservation is never a burden, but a new path for economic growth,” he said. “This has further strengthened our resolve to protect the Yangtze.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/china-daily/former-fishers-at-fore-of-refreshing-yangtze/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/china-daily/former-fishers-at-fore-of-refreshing-yangtze/"},"headline":"Former fishers at fore of refreshing Yangtze","datePublished":"2026-06-18T14:28:29.816Z","dateModified":"2026-06-09T07:28:06.500Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/branded-content/china-daily/former-fishers-at-fore-of-refreshing-yangtze/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[],"articleSection":"Paid Content","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/branded-content/china-daily/former-fishers-at-fore-of-refreshing-yangtze/","name":"Former fishers at fore of refreshing Yangtze"}}]}] ```