TOKYO, Feb. 1, 2023—At formal banquets, Chinese hosts would lavish immaculately cooked giant abalones, scallops, sea cucumbers, shark’s fins, and other seafood dishes artistically arranged on beautiful plates to foreign guests who were so impressed and mesmerized by the taste they did not bother thinking where the ingredients came from.
It was in 1984 when Japan harvested 12.82 million tons of fish, the peak year of Japan’s booming fishery industry as the world’s largest fish capture country. Japan exported surpluses to China in dried form as sought by Chinese food industry that relied on Japanese and other foreign suppliers for the treasured sea food ingredients as China lacked fishing technology and processing harvested fish. China’s fish catch was about 8 million tons, paring with that of the United States, and a big portion of the quantity was carp and other fresh water fish.
In 2020, Japan’s catch
In 2020, the Japanese capture tonnage, including coastal and inland fish culture farming, was 4.23 million tons, or only one-third the 1984 tonnage. Meanwhile, China’s quantity – including both ocean capture and costa/inland culturing – rose to 83.9 million tons, the largest and accounting for 39 percent of the worldwide tonnage of 214 million tons. Fish capture alone, excluding culturing, represented 18 percent of the global total. The data was collected by The Prospect from the Japanese Fisheries Agency, FAO, and other sources.
The numbers graphically show how, in a short time span, China has become the world’s largest and voracious seafood consuming country whose 1.4 billion people until the mid-1980s filled their stomach with humble meals. The emergence of successful Chinese entrepreneurs meant that what were served at stately banquets until four decades ago with expensive imported ingredients have come to be consumed by those nouveau riche, and passively importing them from Japan and elsewhere was not enough. So China decided to become a maritime nation, building runways on the islands it built in the South China Sea and sending massive fishing vessel convoys all over the world to directly and ruthlessly catch fish. And as its low-paid workers began tasting fish, its ships captured more fish globally.
But how has China become the global fishing behemoth despite the fact that its fishing are recognized by the U.N. Law of the Sea and other international treaties and fishery agreements, is only one million square meters, which is less than Japan’s?
A Japanese Fishery Agency official Feb. 1, 2023 told me in a telephone interview that China captures nearly 3 million tons of fish that are not covered by international treaties and agreements, such as those on tuna and salmon, in waters outside sovereign exclusive economic zone (EEZ) waters. Plus, Chinese fishing vessels operate in other countries’ EEZs by ignoring international rules, as they often do around Japan-claimed Senkaku Island, the Sea of Japan, and South China Sea.
There are some 8 million fishermen recognized formerly by the Beijing government but the real number is said to be 12 million or more. Many Chinese fishing boats operate ‘Without 3’ – fishing operation license, boat registration and inspection certificates. Those are the ones that gathered off Senkaku Island, reefs claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as as far as U.S., Canadian ,Chilean and Peruvian waters, the official explained.
The number of Without 3 ships total as many as 12,000, on top of 22,000 or so formally registered. In 2000, Japan and China exchanged a bilateral fisheries agreement that covered 17,500 Chinese fishing vessels, and only 800 Japanese ships.
This alone suffices to guesstimate the Chinese fishing aggression but on top of that, Chineses fishing boats use many illegal tools, for example, extremely bright lighting to attract fish to the sea surface and catch fish en mass, Japanese government officials have told me earlier.
Instead of regulating those ships, the Beijing government often defend them when confronted by foreign authorities, such as the Japanese guard patrol ships near Senkaku and other Japanese south islands, they said.
The Fisheries Agency official I interviewed said, however, China’s over-fishing isn’t the only reason why Japanese fish production is decreasing. ‘Japan’s coastal water has become so clean over those decades that not enough nutrition reach fish and marine resources,’ he said. Is that so?!
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