China’s Distant-Water Fishing Fleet: A Weapon of the Chinese Communist Party

From Galápagos to Ghana to the West Philippine Sea, it is clear that China’s fishing fleet is being used as an instrument of power.

Some of the 220 Chinese vessels are seen moored at Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea on March 7, 2021. Philippine Coast Guard/National Task Force-West Philippine Sea via AP

Commentary

For a long time, episodes such as the Galápagos crisis were treated as conservation crises with geopolitical overtones. A new majority staff report for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security takes the opposite view.

In ”China’s Global Fishing Offensive,” lawmakers describe China’s distant-water fishing fleet as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party,” directed by Beijing and fused with subsidies, processing plants, and overseas ports into a single system for projecting power.

A Fleet Run Like a Weapon

The report pulls together work that nongovernmental organizations and analysts have been doing for years. Drawing heavily on a 2025 Oceana analysis, investigators have determined that Chinese-linked industrial vessels dominated 44 percent of the world’s visible fishing activity between 2022 and 2024, logging more than 110 million hours at sea in the waters of roughly 90 countries.

Depending on how you count militia-linked and foreign-flagged craft, the joint committee report estimates that Beijing commands between 2,000 and 16,000 distant-water fishing vessels—more than triple the combined fleets of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Spain.

Those ships have a dual-use capability. The House report and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s own biennial review both highlight patterns of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, forced labor and abuse aboard Chinese vessels, and the use of fuel subsidies to sustain trips that would otherwise make no commercial sense. They describe a “closed-loop” system in which Chinese boats, Chinese-owned or Chinese-financed overseas ports, and Chinese processing plants feed each other—and, in the process, pull coastal states into long-term dependence on Chinese buyers.

The result is more reflective of abusive state policy than of a commercial industry. The fleet is used to establish presence and precedence in contested waters, to manipulate seafood supply and prices, and to create leverage over governments that lack patrol boats, satellite coverage, or political clout to push back. Illegal fishing is the vehicle.

From Galápagos to West Africa

Nowhere is that asymmetry more visible than in Latin America and West Africa. Around the Galápagos Islands, Oceana and Global Fishing Watch tracked Chinese vessels for a month in 2020 and documented more than 73,000 hours of apparent fishing near the boundary of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), mostly for squid. At key points, dozens of ships went “dark,” switching off their public tracking despite warnings that such behavior is often associated with incursions into protected waters. It’s like turning off the alarms at the bank before breaking in and stealing everything.

The pattern has since spread down the Pacific coast. Chinese fleets regularly cluster off Peru, Chile, and Argentina, working shared migratory stocks without bearing any of the political cost if those stocks collapse. A significant share of the squid and fish then passes through Chinese processing hubs before being re-exported, often to markets that have little knowledge of how it was caught.

In West Africa, the economic damage is even more pronounced. A Stimson Center-linked analysis and investigations by the Financial Transparency Coalition suggest that the region loses about $9.4 billion per year to IUU fishing, much of it driven by Chinese-controlled industrial trawlers working illegally in inshore waters reserved for small-scale fishers.

Bottom trawls shred fragile ecosystems, local crews are pushed farther offshore in smaller boats, coastal economies built on protein from the sea are hollowed out, and these small countries find it difficult to feed a population that has relied on this resource for hundreds of years.

For governments in Accra, Ghana, or Dakar, Senegal, this is not an abstract debate over “rules-based order.” The question is whether their citizens can still make a living from the water at all—and whether the only viable buyer for what remains will be a Chinese processor offering take-it-or-leave-it terms.

Hard Power in the West Philippine Sea

If the Galápagos Islands and West Africa show how China’s fishing offensive works on the margins of geography and governance, the West Philippine Sea shows what happens when it collides with a U.S. treaty ally.

A Chinese coast guard ship fires a water cannon at Unaizah, a Philippine navy chartered vessel, conducting a routine resupply mission to troops stationed at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on March 5, 2024. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

At Scarborough Shoal and nearby Sabina Shoal—well inside the Philippine EEZ—Chinese coast guard and auxiliary vessels have spent years blocking Filipino fishermen from a traditional ground, which the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands, has ruled that Beijing has no legal basis to control.

In recent incidents, Chinese ships have used powerful water cannons against Philippine coast guard and fisheries vessels, shattering windows, mangling superstructures, and injuring sailors and fishermen on humanitarian resupply missions.

Manila’s reports, backed by video footage and independent media, describe Chinese personnel cutting anchor lines and driving off entire clusters of small boats, while Beijing defends its actions as “normal law enforcement” inside its claimed waters.

When China recently declared part of Scarborough a “national nature reserve” and then moved to enforce that status with water cannons and blocking maneuvers, Filipino officials saw the same logic that now worries South Korea in the Yellow Sea: civilian and environmental language on paper, compulsion and bullying in practice.

In the South China Sea, the fishing fleet, the coast guard, and, increasingly, regular People’s Liberation Army Navy ships operate as a single pressure system. The fishing boats justify the coast guard’s presence, the coast guard’s presence normalizes the navy’s, and together, the three send a message to local communities that the only constant fact of life will be Chinese hulls on the horizon.

The System Behind the Boats

The U.S. House report is careful to emphasize that what makes China’s fishing offensive dangerous is not just the number of ships but the way they are plugged into a broader apparatus. Subsidies from Beijing make it rational to chase ever diminishing returns in far-off waters. Loans and joint ventures tie coastal elites into Chinese-backed fishmeal plants and cold-storage facilities. Port investments and so-called logistics hubs offer shelter, fuel, and political cover to trawlers that would otherwise be vulnerable to interdiction.

Oceana’s Galápagos work and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s IUU designations add another layer: the use of opaque corporate structures and flag-of-convenience registries to mask who ultimately controls a given vessel. That opacity makes it difficult for port states or importers to know whether the squid in their supply chains comes from legal, sustainable operations or from a ship that spent half its time “dark” in someone else’s EEZ.

When this machinery shows up around sensitive chokepoints—whether off Ecuador, in West Africa’s upwelling zones, or on the fringes of the South China Sea—it has predictable effects. It erodes food security for coastal communities. It undercuts law-abiding competitors. It creates leverage for the Chinese Communist Party over governments that depend on both access to Chinese markets and the absence of Chinese interference.

Treating Fish as a Security Issue

The House investigation has put a different lens on things. Rather than treating IUU fishing as a niche conservation issue, it argues that the United States and its partners should approach China’s fishing offensive as a security challenge—and build a coalition to match.

Among its recommendations are enhanced U.S. Coast Guard deployments to assist partners in policing their EEZs, mandatory unique identifiers for industrial fishing vessels, tighter port-state controls, and a “Fish for Security” initiative that links access to lucrative markets to basic transparency and labor standards.

Framed correctly, that would not be a campaign against Chinese fishermen as such. It would be a campaign against the opacity and impunity that allow a state-directed fleet to operate as a weapon while still enjoying the privileges of normal commerce. European, Asian, African, and Latin American states all have a stake in that effort because all of them are now on the receiving end of the same pattern: massive, subsidized “civilian” presence in their waters, backed by politics and lawfare from Beijing.

What’s Next

A follow-on piece will look at how that pattern is playing out in the Yellow Sea, where a steel “fish farm” now sits inside a provisional zone between China and South Korea. The global picture is broader and bleaker. From the Galápagos Islands to Ghana to the West Philippine Sea, it is clear that China’s fishing fleet is being used as an instrument of power. The question is whether the rest of the world is prepared to treat it that way—and build the kind of coalition that pushes back against coercion, making fishing about food, work, and a shared resource.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.