“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.
Several paragraphs later:
“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“
Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
According to the 13th Five-Year Plan for the National Fishing Industry http://www.moa.gov.cn/nybgb/2017/derq/201712/t20171227_61312... China had 65398 sea-going fishing boats with a length of at least 12 meters in 2015 and planned to reduce that number to 57095 in 2020. The number of distant-water fishing vessels is given as 2512 in 2015, but I can't find anything to substantiate the claim that it's supposed to be limited to at most 3000 by 2021 (though I didn't read the whole plan, so maybe I missed it). EDIT: Turns out I should have looked at the five-year plan for distant-water fishing specifically, which does say that the number of vessels should be stabilized below 3000 by 2020 and also mentions that at the end of 2016, there were close to 2900 either already deployed or under construction http://www.moa.gov.cn/gk/ghjh_1/201712/t20171227_6128624.htm
Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.
same reason you would lie about the total amount of vessels in the first place.
here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.
It can be difficult to orchestrate years and layers of adjusted statistics to tell a consistent story.
Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.
I have no horse in this race, and may even be persuaded to agree with you, but as other commenters pointed out, the statements in themselves are not logically inconsistent.
The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.
>Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
That's the thing about lies.
At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.
The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.
I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.
Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.
Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?
The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.
Most likely they're interpreting vessels operating in disputed 9dash eez as DWF instead of domestic fleet. So they magically discovered 12,490 new ships not claimed by China, which would not consider them DWF vessels. See table on page 15 of report.
> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.
AND
>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018
CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.
Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.
As with all numbers coming out of the CCP - a healthy dose of skepticism is required. Just like with the Soviet Union's Politburo - all stats and numbers are curated to fit the public face the CCP wishes to present for global consumption.
A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.
We badly need some sort of industrial fish farming at a large scale. Oceanic fishing at this point is basically like hunting gathering at an industrial scale: we just catch whatever we can and who cares if it grows back, not our problem, "nature" will take care of it. The same way we seed, till, etc., we should be doing the same thing with oceans and "hunting" aka fishing should only be allowed as a hobby.
In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
They're doing that. Bring up an areal view of china's coast, zoom in on most any protected bay and you can see they have some kind of aquatic farming going on at a pretty impressive scale.
(Salt water) fish farming is still hunting on an industrial scale because the farmed fish are mostly carnivorous and are fed with feed derived to a large part from hunted fish. It's mostly a tool to strip the oceans even harder (with fish farms converting undesirable catch into species people like to eat, everything becomes a target)
What we need is to reduce the popularity of consuming "predator" fish species -- there is an abundant supply of forage fish, but these are often caught and fed to farmed fish! Sardines and herring aren't popular today, but they'd be a lot more appetizing and sustainable if we just froze them on the boat instead of grinding them into fishmeal to be fed to tilapia or salmon. See:
Overfishing aside I believe cephalopods (such as squid) are expected to thrive relative to other marine creatures - they seem to be well poised to adapt in response to rising ocean acidification/CO2 and decreasing fish stocks
Being completely ignorant of the fishing industry, these numbers of vessels seem crazy high. I had no idea.
Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry? Are there 100,000 distant-water vessels active in the world? Or only 25,000 total?
If the Chinese represent 20% of the world industry, but are trying to feed 18% of the world's population, that doesn't seem outrageous. But if they represent 50% of the world industry, then my eyebrows go up.
At the same time, if the US represents 10% of the industry and 4% of world population, or if UK represents 3% of the industry but <1% of world population, doesn't that make it a bit hard to swallow?
Almost all of the numbers above are made up. I don't know what they really are. That's my point. I'm reluctant to grab my pitchfork with my current level of ignorance.
> Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry
For comparison, the 2nd/3rd/4th largest distant-water fleets are Taiwan at around 400 and Japan and S. Korea at around 150-200 [0]. Probably the entire rest of the world accounts for less than 10% of foreign fishing.
Are there plans for an international fishing and plastic disposal sanctions? Citizens can justly complain a faraway country is turning their fish rarer and more poisnous.
What are they doing with all that squid? If the market price of the squid doesn't cover the cost of extraction, then that must mean there isn't much demand for the product.
Is the world just going to have to let China own itself to learn the hard way?
Like, it just seems like a bad news generator and we constantly need to dance around the CCP trying to guide them appropriately with sanctions, and threats and incentives.
I understand depleting the oceans would be catastrophic, but how is this regime ever going to learn? Honest question?
Well someone has to choose what bad news to highlight and how biased to highlight said news. For example, per capita, Taiwan and S.Korea have larger DWF fleets, Taiwan significantly so. Factor in EEZ and you get a good idea of why.
We need less people in the world. Our only hope to avoid mass human suffering is that as more women get educated and independent they reduce the number of children they’ll conceive to 1 or 2.
Personally, I think people are an asset, not a burden, and the greatest things in the world! That's right, I mean you, dear reader. Straighten that back!
There is so much room left to consume less or in a more sustainable way. We can produce more than enough food for everyone and drastically cut down on meat consumption and stop fishing from the ocean. That would make a huge difference for sustainability and carbon footprint.
However, non of this will happen. We are still in a world where countries fight over getting more resources to consume. That needs to shift to fighting to protect resources. We need sanctions on countries that fish too much and have too high emissions. Otherwise we will be caught in the tragedy of the commons till the planet is uninhabitable.
Meanwhile we cannot even properly coordinate a response to a pandemic.
This is not correct. The world can currently sustain all 8 billion people and then some. It simply chooses not to. Population control is a very weird argument and I'd like to not hear it anymore, as someone who used to believe it.
Don't forget behind China, you got India, SEA, the rest of Africa which will experience a population boom this century. How we going to feed all these people when their living standards go up? We need to get to mars fast.
Disappointed in the article. When I saw the Yale domain I thought it would be a research paper or at least something written by an expert on the subject. It appears this is written by a journalist[0] and as typical of things written hy journalists, leaves out crucial details/sources which leaves you with more questions.
> the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions.
???? The article doesn't go any further, but how would you use a bunch of unarmed fishing vessels crewed by "illiterates" (according to the article) for anything resembling a military purpose. Later on it mentions "crowding" but doesn't really go into detail about what that means.
Plus what is a "distant water fishing fleet"? The article gives numbers for overall number of fishing vessels and then "distant water fishing fleet", but only provides context for the later number by saying the US has only 300 such boats in its fleet. If a country with coasts on two oceans only has 300 of these, it has to be some really specific category of boat right? What makes this category important?
And of course there's the framing of the article, the fishing is done by private commercial fishers but apparently their entire country is to blame. I mean you can make some arguments about subsidies but then the article itself acknowledges that other countries also engage in similar level of subsidies.
Also there's this weird fixation on North Korea, where it claims the Chinese fishing fleet is depleting North Korean waters, but doesn't really tell us about whether or not that's done with North Korea's permission. It mentions that it would be technically illegal for NK to sell fishing rights, but that doesn't really bear any significance.
> As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment...
As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries. These sentiments seem to align with the values promoted by the Yale School of the Environment [1]. The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
[+] [-] evancox100|5 years ago|reply
“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.
Several paragraphs later:
“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“
Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
[+] [-] yorwba|5 years ago|reply
Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.
[+] [-] barnesto|5 years ago|reply
here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariellasimke/2020/08/09/over-20...
it's not "inconsistent propaganda" it's under-reporting and outright lying, which is par for the course when it comes to the CCP.
[+] [-] cltsang|5 years ago|reply
Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.
[+] [-] wenc|5 years ago|reply
The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.
[+] [-] libertine|5 years ago|reply
That's the thing about lies.
At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.
The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.
I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.
Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.
Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?
The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.
[+] [-] La1n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ephemeralism|5 years ago|reply
Furthermore, it says restrict to under 3000, while you have changed it to reduce.
[+] [-] dirtyid|5 years ago|reply
> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.
AND
>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018
CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.
Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-document...
[1] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
[+] [-] skido8|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Alupis|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Alupis|5 years ago|reply
A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.
[+] [-] dis-sys|5 years ago|reply
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-shanghai-population...
According to your logic, they are lying about the population size of Shanghai as well? LOL
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
[+] [-] SaintGhurka|5 years ago|reply
They're doing that. Bring up an areal view of china's coast, zoom in on most any protected bay and you can see they have some kind of aquatic farming going on at a pretty impressive scale.
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.8785992,117.6354366,322m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.6576045,117.4483416,171m/dat...
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=d1e87c14-b29f-4173-a4f5-cbd56...
[+] [-] usrusr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture#/media/File:Global...
What we need is to reduce the popularity of consuming "predator" fish species -- there is an abundant supply of forage fish, but these are often caught and fed to farmed fish! Sardines and herring aren't popular today, but they'd be a lot more appetizing and sustainable if we just froze them on the boat instead of grinding them into fishmeal to be fed to tilapia or salmon. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forage_fish
[+] [-] mymythisisthis|5 years ago|reply
I've already witnessed the collapse of fishing in the oceans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926128
[+] [-] f00zz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vansul|5 years ago|reply
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-squid-climate.html https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/23/octopuse...
[+] [-] freeopinion|5 years ago|reply
Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry? Are there 100,000 distant-water vessels active in the world? Or only 25,000 total?
If the Chinese represent 20% of the world industry, but are trying to feed 18% of the world's population, that doesn't seem outrageous. But if they represent 50% of the world industry, then my eyebrows go up.
At the same time, if the US represents 10% of the industry and 4% of world population, or if UK represents 3% of the industry but <1% of world population, doesn't that make it a bit hard to swallow?
Almost all of the numbers above are made up. I don't know what they really are. That's my point. I'm reluctant to grab my pitchfork with my current level of ignorance.
[+] [-] MagnumOpus|5 years ago|reply
For comparison, the 2nd/3rd/4th largest distant-water fleets are Taiwan at around 400 and Japan and S. Korea at around 150-200 [0]. Probably the entire rest of the world accounts for less than 10% of foreign fishing.
[0] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] aitchnyu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rich_sasha|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
Like, it just seems like a bad news generator and we constantly need to dance around the CCP trying to guide them appropriately with sanctions, and threats and incentives.
I understand depleting the oceans would be catastrophic, but how is this regime ever going to learn? Honest question?
[+] [-] adrianN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ephemeralism|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dirtyid|5 years ago|reply
Well someone has to choose what bad news to highlight and how biased to highlight said news. For example, per capita, Taiwan and S.Korea have larger DWF fleets, Taiwan significantly so. Factor in EEZ and you get a good idea of why.
China: 1400m ppl / 3000 dwf fleet / 900,000km2 eez (3.8m with disputes)
Taiwan: 24m / 414 / 90,000km2
Japan: 162m / 162 / 4,500,000km2
S.Korea: 52m / 198 / 300,00km2
Spain: 47m / 65 / 1,000,000km2
https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
This EEZ map really explains a lot of tensions in these maritime disputes.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7292/10134658063_fca4fc3da2_o...
[+] [-] dr-detroit|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] warmcat|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fakeslimshady|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] skido8|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] apta|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] holografix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120114/under...
Personally, I think people are an asset, not a burden, and the greatest things in the world! That's right, I mean you, dear reader. Straighten that back!
[+] [-] lkramer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajmurmann|5 years ago|reply
However, non of this will happen. We are still in a world where countries fight over getting more resources to consume. That needs to shift to fighting to protect resources. We need sanctions on countries that fish too much and have too high emissions. Otherwise we will be caught in the tragedy of the commons till the planet is uninhabitable.
Meanwhile we cannot even properly coordinate a response to a pandemic.
[+] [-] refresher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f00zz|5 years ago|reply
This is already the case in most of the world, including many developing countries.
[+] [-] rrrrrrrrrrrr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knolax|5 years ago|reply
> the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions.
???? The article doesn't go any further, but how would you use a bunch of unarmed fishing vessels crewed by "illiterates" (according to the article) for anything resembling a military purpose. Later on it mentions "crowding" but doesn't really go into detail about what that means.
Plus what is a "distant water fishing fleet"? The article gives numbers for overall number of fishing vessels and then "distant water fishing fleet", but only provides context for the later number by saying the US has only 300 such boats in its fleet. If a country with coasts on two oceans only has 300 of these, it has to be some really specific category of boat right? What makes this category important?
And of course there's the framing of the article, the fishing is done by private commercial fishers but apparently their entire country is to blame. I mean you can make some arguments about subsidies but then the article itself acknowledges that other countries also engage in similar level of subsidies.
Also there's this weird fixation on North Korea, where it claims the Chinese fishing fleet is depleting North Korean waters, but doesn't really tell us about whether or not that's done with North Korea's permission. It mentions that it would be technically illegal for NK to sell fishing rights, but that doesn't really bear any significance.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Urbina
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
> As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment...
As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries. These sentiments seem to align with the values promoted by the Yale School of the Environment [1]. The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
[1] https://environment.yale.edu/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/china-illegal-fishing-fleet...