15 ms·

Unmasking China's Invisible Fleet

166 points by marvinpinto 6y ago

sradman 6y 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_me 6y 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 6y 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.
    - Roritharr 6y ago
      Very well put. It's one of the things I decry often when talking about european politics. If Europe wants to be taken seriously, it can't just be the French having a medium sized stick to back their soft power.
      - NicoJuicy 6y ago
        Europe invests 1%-2% in their military. By comparison, Russia invests 5%-6%, but it's GDP is similar to Italy, i'd claim the "stick" ( if required) is a bit larger than you might expect :) After all, it's mostly a numbers game.
      - me_me_me 6y ago
        Europe is one of the biggest economical block, there is already a lot of soft power EU can exert via tariffs and bans. Military is not as important as it used to be. Russia is not going to attack EU country ever. Who is going to buy their gas and oil? They had to use the 'greenmen' to attack mainland Ukraine in attempt to reduce international backlash.
    - valuearb 6y ago
      The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history. It’s the League of Nations with better PR. Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees. The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd.
      - ethbro 6y ago
        > The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history. Last "nuclear war" was on 9 August 1945. UN formed on 24 October 1945. > Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees. Yes, it does. If they have large militaries and/or economies. > The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd. No, it wouldn't. The point of the UN is to avoid war, not to spread democracy [1]. The structure of the UN is a consequence of that aim. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations#Chapter_I:_Purposes_And_Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations#...
        kohtatsu 6y ago
        Are you not aware of what's going on in Xinjiang? (Or Tibet or to practitioners of Falun Gong or even christianity in China) From the first article of the first charter: > 2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; > 3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends. Democracy or not they do not belong on the UN Human Rights Council.
  - peroporque 6y 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.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      It's not as if you can't do dialog without the UN.
      - brnt 6y ago
        And the US could be free without the Union, but it makes it an afwul lot easier regardless.
      - peroporque 6y ago
        Please read at least one book on international diplomacy, then come back.
  - dragonelite 6y 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.
  - dependenttypes 6y 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vbtemp 6y 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 6y ago
  So much light that it can be seen from space! [0] [0] https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishing-industrys-massive-scale/ https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishi...
- mytailorisrich 6y 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.
  - vbtemp 6y 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.
- yorwba 6y 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.
oefrha 6y 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.
- yorwba 6y 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/ 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/T1/ 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/F1/ 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 6y 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 6y 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/ https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/ Edited to include author name
generatorguy 6y 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 6y 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_northwest_cod_fishery#/media/File:Time_series_for_collapse_of_Atlantic_northwest_cod.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north... From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
jvanderbot 6y 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 6y ago
老外又在黑中国了

166 points by marvinpinto 6y 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_me 6y 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 6y 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.
  - Roritharr 6y ago
    Very well put. It's one of the things I decry often when talking about european politics. If Europe wants to be taken seriously, it can't just be the French having a medium sized stick to back their soft power.
    - NicoJuicy 6y ago
      Europe invests 1%-2% in their military. By comparison, Russia invests 5%-6%, but it's GDP is similar to Italy, i'd claim the "stick" ( if required) is a bit larger than you might expect :) After all, it's mostly a numbers game.
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      Europe is one of the biggest economical block, there is already a lot of soft power EU can exert via tariffs and bans. Military is not as important as it used to be. Russia is not going to attack EU country ever. Who is going to buy their gas and oil? They had to use the 'greenmen' to attack mainland Ukraine in attempt to reduce international backlash.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history. It’s the League of Nations with better PR. Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees. The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      > The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history. Last "nuclear war" was on 9 August 1945. UN formed on 24 October 1945. > Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees. Yes, it does. If they have large militaries and/or economies. > The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd. No, it wouldn't. The point of the UN is to avoid war, not to spread democracy [1]. The structure of the UN is a consequence of that aim. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations#Chapter_I:_Purposes_And_Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations#...
      - kohtatsu 6y ago
        Are you not aware of what's going on in Xinjiang? (Or Tibet or to practitioners of Falun Gong or even christianity in China) From the first article of the first charter: > 2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; > 3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends. Democracy or not they do not belong on the UN Human Rights Council.
- peroporque 6y 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.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    It's not as if you can't do dialog without the UN.
    - brnt 6y ago
      And the US could be free without the Union, but it makes it an afwul lot easier regardless.
    - peroporque 6y ago
      Please read at least one book on international diplomacy, then come back.
- dragonelite 6y 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.
- dependenttypes 6y 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vbtemp 6y 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 6y ago
So much light that it can be seen from space! [0] [0] https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishing-industrys-massive-scale/ https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishi...
mytailorisrich 6y 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.
- vbtemp 6y 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.
yorwba 6y 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.

oefrha 6y 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.

yorwba 6y 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/ 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/T1/ 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/F1/ 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 6y 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 6y 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/ https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/ Edited to include author name

generatorguy 6y 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 6y 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_northwest_cod_fishery#/media/File:Time_series_for_collapse_of_Atlantic_northwest_cod.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north... From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

jvanderbot 6y 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 6y ago

老外又在黑中国了