Unmasking China's Invisible Fleet

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/china-at-sea

by marvinpinto • 6 years ago

166 53 6 years ago

newsinteractives.cbc.ca

sradman• 6 years ago

China and North Korea appear to have a side-deal for fishing rights which violates U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea.

me_me_me2• 6 years ago

I think UN should have a vote about it to decide on the panelty. Oh wait, it was veto'ed again.

UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke (well, apart from peace keeping missions).

xoa• 6 years ago

UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke

Well, the UN ultimately mostly reflects actual geopolitical reality. It's not actually a world government, there is no world government. It has the power nation-states choose to give it. The countries that wield vetoes? They also generally wield real "vetoes" IRL, ie., they've got nukes/massive militaries/economies. The formal legal veto they have in the UN merely reflects that if there was no UN, they'd have options on things they didn't like regardless. A basic point of the UN was to try to prevent WW3, and in that respect it did pretty well. For all the ideals, a lot of the core parts of it are pretty pragmatic about the limitations embodied by definition in anything "international". It seeks consensus and to avoid hot conflicts, and the former is pretty important to avoiding the latter.

Obviously it's not entirely without power of its own, particularly various kinds of soft power. But that soft power has sharp limits without hard power backing it, which is a very sticky wicket in most scenarios that make the news.

peroporque2• 6 years ago

If you favor war over dialog, then your opinion would be understandable.

Thankfully, most people don't. So it's a good thing the UN exists.

It's a forum of dialog, not a parliament to make laws.

dragonelite• 6 years ago

The UN is a paper tiger by design, at the core its nothing more then a forum for UN permanent members to talk with each other. And to make sure red lines are well defined and not accidentally being crossed.

dependenttypes2• 6 years ago

well, apart from peace keeping missions

Which were responsible for the Haiti cholera outbreak as well as its cover-up. The UN is worse than useless.

vbtemp2• 6 years ago

I know this article is about the waters off Korea, but I noticed a similar thing flying over the South China Sea, in particular the Tokyo-Bangkok route.

Flying late at night over the SCS, and then peering out the window from 40k ft, you see endless lights - thousands and thousands of them. At first I thought I was over land, but then checked the map. The next trip I noticed the same thing, and then the same. It was literally tens of thousands of these fishing trawlers, stretching as far as the eye can see. Presumably all Chinese, and also presumably present not just to trawl for seafood, but to establish facts on the sea. It was truly frightening and shocking.

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

So much light that it can be seen from space! [0]

[0] https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishi...

mytailorisrich2• 6 years ago

I'm not expert on air routes but Bangkok to Tokyo sounds like it would go over the North part of the South China Sea, near Hainan then along the coast of China. So not really where the flashpoints are.

Not sure what would be frightening and shocking apart perhaps from the potential overfishing, which is unfortunately widespread worldwide.

I'm sure that Vietnam, especially, and other neighbouring countries also have extensive fishing fleets in the South China Sea at large.

vbtemp2• 6 years ago

It goes a little farther south and then hangs a right turn to fly toward BKK from due East. So this was more from the south-central portion of the region. The "shocking" part was just the astounding number of vessels, stretching beyond the horizon.

yorwba3• 6 years ago

Presumably all Chinese

That seems unlikely considering that Vietnam's entire coastline forms the western border of the South China Sea, so that's where they're most likely to fish. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia also border the sea and occasionally stop fishing boats in what they consider their territorial waters.

China probably has the largest fleet, but that doesn't mean the other countries are just watching them fish without doing anything.

jvanderbot2• 6 years ago

OP/TFA implied that it was indeed Chinese, by encroaching on territorial waters and crowding out native fleets. At least that was my reading of the article and the above comment.

nabla94• 6 years ago

Many of those ships have crews that are part of the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM). The militia are organized and commanded directly by the PLA's local military commands. They don't normally carry weapons, but they have military communications equipment and readiness to support PLA Navy.

https://www.andrewerickson.com/2016/03/chinas-maritime-milit...

derefr• 6 years ago

How different is that from the US Coast Guard's (and especially regular merchant ships whose crews are part of the Coast Guard Reserve's) wartime function? I would suppose that all organized merchant-marine escort fleets are trained to cooperate/coordinate with their country's Navy; if not just to "get the heck out of the way, this area is about to be under attack."

Also, AFAIK, it's a de-facto "law of the sea" that pretty much all ships with transponders—no matter the flag they fly—will willingly act as relays for other ships that cannot communicate, in order to facilitate search-and-rescue. Same with planes. It's a whole part of their signalling codes.

gruez2• 6 years ago

They don't normally carry weapons, but they have military communications equipment and readiness to support PLA Navy.

How are they supposed to support the PLA navy if all they have is a boat with some military radios? The only thing I can think of is cannon fodder or search and rescue.

topkai22• 6 years ago

Embedding surveillance and comms capabilities in fishing fleets is an old trick- there is even a reference in Wikipedia for the Soviets doing it in the 80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_ship).

That's not to dismiss it- the PLAN is almost certainly using the fishing fleet to expand its capabilities, and the giant size of the "invisible fleet" has national security implications for the region. The article touches on the use of the fishing fleet to assert Chinese claims to the Spratley islands and other contested regions, which is definitely a concern for regional stability.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

Depending on where you were it might be the Japanese fishing fleet as well.

At night, the footprint of the Japanese fishing fleet in lights can expand the apparent size of the Japanese islands by what seems like double the area.

oefrha• 6 years ago

Something is a bit fishy (okay I’m stretching this a bit).

TFA discusses all the subsidies and other forms of help from Chinese government, then toward the end it says

Still, China is hardly the worst offender when it comes to such subsidies, which ocean conservationists say, through over-capacity and illegal fishing, are a major reason that the oceans are rapidly running out of fish. The countries that provide the largest subsidies to their high-seas fishing fleets are Japan (20 per cent of the global subsidies) and Spain (14 per cent), followed by China, South Korea, and the United States, according to Sala's research.

First, kinda weird the percentage stats just stopped at Spain, making it impossible to put things into perspective.

Secondly, if Chinese fleets with all the alarming-sounding numbers only place at the third, what are the Japanese and Spaniards doing here? What about their fleet sizes? (Btw, IMHO the number of vessels may be a poor measurement of fleet size, compared to, say, total displacement; we all know how 17,000 little dinghies would compare to 300 aircraft carriers, to give an extreme example.) Do they have even larger fleets? Or do they pay more subsidies per head (or per vessel? or ton of product?) for whatever reason? Unfortunately TFA doesn’t discuss any of that.

yorwba3• 6 years ago

The word "research" in the preceding paragraph is a link to said research, and the full text is available here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/

That article also only gives percentages for Japan and Spain, but lists the raw numbers in Table 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/table/T... , so the missing percentages for China (10%), South Korea (10%) and United States (6%) can be calculated.

They don't measure fleet size by displacement but by number of vessels: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/figure/... There doesn't appear to be a monotonic relationship between total subsidies and fleet size by that measure (e.g. Taiwan appears second by number of vessels after China but before Japan, despite their subsidies only amounting to 6% of the total).

dirtyid• 6 years ago

Critics also accuse China of keeping high-quality squid for domestic consumption, exporting lower-quality products at higher prices.

Always thought I tasted a difference. This explains a lot.

qchris• 6 years ago

If you haven't read the book written by the NYTimes journalist Ian Urbina that much of the original research this article refers to, I highly, highly recommend it [1]. Not only is it illuminating, but the writing and stories within it are extremely compelling on a human level as well. I got a copy of it over the holidays, and literally experienced the trope of having a hard time putting it down.

[1] https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/

Edited to include author name

generatorguy• 6 years ago

A fisherman I was speaking to in NZ noted on their ships radar lines of trawlers just outside NZ waters presumably doing the same thing - dragging nets between the trawlers and indiscriminately taking everything - or bottom trawling and mowing the sea floor flat and void of life. It is the tragedy of the commons that we can't manage this shared renewable resource. Canada has destroyed their Atlantic fisheries. If they can't manage not to take every fish in the ocean I'm not surprised the rest of the world can't resist it either.

mthoms• 6 years ago

Canada has destroyed their Atlantic fisheries

Not entirely accurate. There's lots of blame to go around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

From:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

jvanderbot2• 6 years ago

In a trip to south africa, entire sections of some cities were being "bought" by China. In retaliation, locals occasionally refuse to sell fuel to Chinese fishing vessels, which, like those in TFA, were there illegally.

5m17h• 6 years ago

老外又在黑中国了

Unmasking China's Invisible Fleet

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