China launched its first distant-water fishing fleet in 1985, when a state-owned company called the China National Fisheries Corporation dispatched thirteen trawlers to the coast of Guinea-Bissau. China had fished its own coastal waters aggressively. Since the sixties, its seafood biomass has dropped by ninety per cent. Zhang Yanxi, the general manager of the company, argued that joining “the ranks of the world’s offshore fisheries powers” would make China money, create jobs, feed its population, and safeguard its maritime rights. The government held a grand farewell ceremony for the launch of the first ships, with more than a thousand attendees, including Communist Party élites.
Since then, China has invested heavily in its fleet. China’s fleet has also expanded the government’s international influence. The country has built scores of ports as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure program that has, at times, made it the largest financier of development in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
Military analysts believe that China uses its fleet for surveillance. In 2017, the country passed a law requiring private citizens and businesses to support Chinese intelligence efforts. Ports employ a digital logistics platform called Logink, which tracks the movement of ships and goods in the surrounding area – including possibly American military cargo.
China also pushes its fleet into contested waters. “China likely believes that, in time, the presence of its distant-water fleet will convert into some degree of sovereign control over those waters,” Ralby, the maritime-security expert, told me. Some of its ships are disguised as fishing vessels but actually form what experts call a “maritime militia.” According to research collected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Chinese government pays the owners of some of these ships forty-five hundred dollars a day to remain in contested areas for most of the year. Satellite data shows that, last year, several dozen ships illegally fished in Taiwanese waters and that there were two hundred ships in disputed portions of the South China Sea. The ships help execute what a recent Congressional Research Service study called “‘gray zone’ operations that use coercion short of war.” They escort Chinese oil-and-gas survey vessels, deliver supplies, and obstruct foreign ships.