A Geopolitical Economy of China’s Distant Water Fisheries

China is the world’s largest fishing nation, capturing more marine fish than the second- and third-largest countries combined. It is portrayed as a voracious consumer of ocean resources, a serial abuser of labour, and as aggressively expanding into developing country waters in an extractivist drive that destroys small scale fishers’ livelihoods. Yet, what does taking a historical view tell us about China’s activities vis-à-vis other distant water fishing nations? Is the relationship with coastal states an example of neocolonialism or, as the Chinese party-state insists, “mutual benefit”? And should we treat China’s distant water fishing fleet as a tool of “grand strategy” directed from Beijing or as chaotic market-driven firms driven into new frontiers by the exhaustion of domestic resources? This intervention seeks to navigate through these binaries to argue that China’s distant water fleet is the most recent example in a long history of pelagic imperialism by advanced capitalist fishing interests, where fish are a raw material in a wider generative industrial strategy and fishing activity is a diplomatic tool in international politics. China’s distant water fleet is best understood as a relatively coherent cluster of capitals-in-competition, set in a mosaic of variegated state-capital relations, in tension at different relational scales.

is Professor of International Business and Development at Queen Mary University of London, and is based at the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production. He has worked on the articulation of natural resource industries, trade and industrial policy, and unsustainable development for 20 years. He recently co-authored (Verso, 2021) and (Routledge, 2021), and co-edited (Agenda/ Colombia University Press, 2022).

Host or Publisher University of London Institute in Paris