Posted on 09/03/2023 8:37:10 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie
They sweep the sea in 400-ship swarms, Chinese fishing boats that—based on time of year and fishery—include trawlers, purse seiners, gill-netters, pole-and-line platforms, squid jiggers, tuna longliners, wood-hulled freighters, and sail-masted junks.
The fleet is shepherded by oil tankers, supply barges, “research” vessels, and hospital ships, shadowed by Chinese navy warships and coast guard cutters, and serviced by massive motherships with 500,000 cubic feet of frozen storage holds.
Rotating motherships ferry harvests to China and return with provisions on a continuous cycle so the fleet can keep fishing until there are no more fish and it must move on to keep fishing until there are no more fish in the new areas across the globe, from Senegal to the South Pacific.
Chinese fishing armadas are becoming common and long-lingering sights in international waters just beyond 200-mile national exclusive economic zones (EEZ) off Africa’s and South America’s coasts and across the vast central and western Pacific, including off—and allegedly in—the sovereign waters of Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), which are United States territories.
Marauding Chinese fishing boats have destroyed domestic commercial industries and damaged sports-fishing businesses across the Pacific, island leaders told a Congressional panel during meetings and field hearings staged on Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, Palau, and Micronesia between Aug. 23–Aug. 28.
“When you take away from the livelihoods of the community, you take away the very vital strength for them to survive. That threat is real,” Guam House of Representatives Vice Speaker Tina Barnes (D-Hagatna) told the House Natural Resources Committee Indo-Pacific Task Force during an Aug. 24 "Peace Through Strength: The Strategic Importance of the Pacific Islands to U.S.-led Global Security" hearing in Tamuning, Guam.
Leaders from the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), Republic of Palau, and Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) joined territorial government officials in citing illegal fishing by swarming Chinese boats as part of a “political warfare” pattern of economic coercion, subversion, harassment, and overt threats orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to sew discord among local governments, businesses, and civic groups across the Pacific in a persistent effort to drive a wedge between them and the United States.
“Palau has closed off our waters to commercial fishing because it's just too impossible to regulate,” Republic of Palau Minister of Finance Kaleb Udui testified during the field hearing, foregoing revenues from selling fishing licenses to foreign vessels inside its EEZ outside the globally prized Palau National Marine Sanctuary.
When confronted by South Korean Coast Guard helicopters and ships in the Yellow Sea in November 2011, this swarm of Chinese fishing boats banded together with ropes and bulled into the open sea— behind a shield of Chinese warships. (Dong-a Ilbo/AFP/Getty Images)
Island leaders told the nine-member Indo-Pacific Task Force panel that Chinese fishing fleets, whether by official CCP policy or by indifference, are force-multipliers for organized crime, especially in smuggling and human trafficking activities, while providing cover for Chinese military surveillance, sabotage, and cyber intrusions against infrastructure and United States military installations.
None of this should be a surprise, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said.
SNIP
Forget Global Warming the Chinese Communist Party is the real danger
Where they anchor, the waters turn dark brown ...
“immigrants” are doing the same thing to the USA.
Show ‘em the drain—sink ‘em all!!
But it’s America that is an existential threat to Mother Earth.
you want World war III, because that's how you start world war III
keep buying chinese fish, squid, shrimp( feed human poo in ponds with massive amouts of antibiotics) etc, and...they'll keep over harvesting them
—what—?—no Greenpeace anti-fishing boat—??(sarc)
Seems like blatantly disregarding international agreements, stealing other countries resources, and plying the oceans with 17,000 illegal fishing ships are acts of war, but strangely, China doesn't seem too concerned about engaging in that behavior. Best to let the big scary guy have whatever he wants. Maybe he won't hurt us.
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Chinese fishing fleet are locusts.
It’d be a damn shame if a dozen or so of the ships were to become unusable.
At some point we are going to have to do something about it.
If Clinton had done something about it back in the 90's when they were fishing out the waters off Somalia we would not have some of the problems we have now.
But he didn't. The Chi-Coms fished out the waters and the people were left with one of two options, starve or piracy.
Polynesia. A million square miles of ocean. China-a billion and a half people. Who’s gonna stand up for the islanders-the French?
There was an unproven instance of a submarine gettin tangled in the nets of a commercial fishing boat. Took the whole boat and crew down to the bottom.
Soviet Russia did it too, with whaling. They wiped out an entire species of whale, trying to hide their activity from the rest of the world.
It’s a symptom of Communism, and thinking, “Everything is mine anyway, I’ll do what I want.”
Their faltering economy and difficulty producing food are adding to the problem.
The fish population is finite. Sounds like they intend to kill it until it dies.
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