China’s Monster Fishing Fleet (...has a unique military mission.)

https://foreignpolicy.com ^ | NOVEMBER 30, 2020, | BY CHRISTOPHER PALA

[RomanSoldier19]

Though not alone in its destructive practices, Beijing’s rapacious fleet causes humanitarian disasters and has a unique military mission.

On Aug. 5, 2017, China complied with a United Nations decision and formally imposed sanctions on North Korea, including a ban on seafood exports. Seafood, particularly squid, is one of North Korea’s few significant foreign-exchange earners, and the sanctions were expected to increase the pressure on the regime.

But just a few weeks after the ban came into effect, hundreds of squid-fishing vessels left Chinese waters and rounded the southern tip of South Korea. They entered North Korea’s 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), nearly doubling the number of Chinese fishing vessels operating there from 557 to 907, according a recent Global Fishing Watch report that tracked data from four different satellite systems. Even as China publicly claimed that is was complying with sanctions, many of the Chinese vessels continued to make trips to North Korea and back, including several round trips each year during both 2018 and 2019, said Jaeyoon Park, one of the report’s lead authors.

The Chinese fleet, made up of squid jiggers and pair trawlers, scooped up a staggering amount of squid—equal to almost as much as the entire squid catch in Japanese and South Korean waters combined over the same period, the report estimated. The Chinese decimated the squid population off North Korea to such a degree that Japanese and South Korean fishers saw their own take of the usually plentiful, migratory species

[RomanSoldier19]

Its own coastline, once among the richest in the world, has been more overfished by its 300,000-strong domestic coastal fleet than the waters of almost any other nation, with less than 15 percent of the original fish biomass remaining

[ptsal]

Does China do anything good?

[Dr. Pritchett]

China is a global free rider. Remember the day after that idiot navy captain publicly announced his carrier was tied up in Guam with a sick crew, the Chinese collided a sunk a Vietnamese fishing vessel. We were all busy because the acting SECNAV made a disparaging comment about the captain and his terrible OPSEC.

[sauropod]

.

[EQAndyBuzz]

“Does China do anything good?”

Eggrolls. That’s about it.

[BobL]

“Does China do anything good?”

Let’s hope so. Given the Democrats destroying this country (and some of us enabling them by boycotting the Georgia runoffs), control of the world is there’s for the taking, and they are slowly taking it.

[SgtHooper]

We rearry good at ping pong!