Like Japan’s long-range fishing, historically linked to specific resources such as red tuna or certain varieties of mollusc, China’s presence has been felt for a long time already well beyond waters belonging to ‘exclusive economic zones’ (EEZs, legally defined as areas in which a littoral country can exercise lucrative activities): the Southern Pacific, all the way down to French Polynesia, is largely fished by Chinese fleets. Instead of targeting particular species, the driving force behind this activity is national food security and the economic survival of Chinese fishing concerns. The map clearly indicates the results of this long-range fishing in waters beyond the limits of EEZs.
According to reports prepared by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and to studies published in Nature [see map], Chinese fishing vessels siphoned off, far from their own shores, between 3.4 and 6.1 million tons of fish a year between 2000 and 2011. Over the same period, Beijing was only declaring an average of 368,000 tons of fish to the FAO, i.e. twelve times less than the calculations of fisheries experts. The value of China’s foreign catches is apparently around 8.9 billion euros every year. The country is therefore not only gravely underestimating its annual foreign catch, but also overestimating the figures within its own territorial waters—given the dearth of real and open statistical data, researchers have tallied the data different countries have published for their own EEZs.
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