China’s aggressive, sometimes illegal fishing practices are the latest source of conflict with the United States.
China has the world’s largest fishing fleet. Beijing claims to send around 2,600 vessels out to fish across the globe, but some maritime experts say this distant-water fishing fleet may number nearly 17,000. The United States has fewer than 300 distant-water ships.
According to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations control marine resources within a 200-mile “exclusive economic zone”; beyond that are international waters. While the U.S. never signed the treaty, it has declared a 200-mile offshore exclusive economic zone.
Bolstered by generous subsidies and at times protected by armed coast guard cutters, Chinese fishermen have been illegally fishing near the Korean Peninsula and in the South China Sea, a hotly contested area claimed by six countries. By exploiting these waters China has come to dominate the international squid market. Nearly half of this catch is exported to other Asian nations, Europe and the U.S.
Chinese ships have even pushed as far as Africa and South America, where fishermen have been known to remove their identifying flags to avoid detection. In 2017 Ecuador caught 20 Chinese fishermen in the environmentally protected Galapagos Marine Reserve and sentenced them to four years in prison for capturing thousands of sharks.
In August, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized China for “predatory fishing practices” that violate “the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of coastal states.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said Pompeo was just trying to “stir up trouble for other countries.”
But Pompeo’s rebuke is about more than fish. Governments often use the fishing industry to advance their diplomatic agenda. The U.S. used fishing, directly and indirectly, to build its international empire from its founding through the 20th century. Now China’s doing it, too.
Before the 1800s, when international law began to define maritime rights, restrictions on fishing depended wholly on what a given nation could enforce.
That’s why, at the Paris negotiation to end the Revolutionary War in 1783, future president John Adams insisted that Great Britain recognize the right of Americans to fish the North Atlantic.
Because American fishing rights were recognized alongside American statehood, generations of U.S. diplomats associated the two.
For decades, the U.S. and Great Britain quarreled over international fishing, leading to many new and renegotiated treaties. At each turn, the Americans uniformly defended their right to fish the North Atlantic.
By the 1860s, international fishing had become a key component of America’s newly expansionist foreign policy. Between 1850 and 1898, the U.S. annexed numerous overseas territories, among them Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. Today this empire gives both American fishing vessels and the U.S. military a global reach.
American diplomats of the 1940s used the notion of “maximum sustainable yield” – that is, the idea that there is a level of fishing that maximizes the number of fish caught without damaging the long-term health of fisheries – to expand American maritime influence.
The idea was more political tool than scientific discovery. But the U.S. used this faux sustainability argument to pass laws and agreements that limited foreign incursions into American waters while giving American fishermen freer reign over the world’s oceans.
As the Cold War developed in the 1950s, “fish diplomacy” helped the U.S. shore up allies to counter the Soviet Union.
Washington gave generous subsidies to expand the fishing fleets of various countries. The U.S. also lowered tariffs for strategically located fishing nations, making fish cheaper for Americans to buy.
This history helps explain why the U.S. now sees China’s enormous fishing fleet and international trawling as a threat. In sending its fishermen far and wide, Beijing has, wittingly or not, followed America’s lead.
Blake Earle is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. Distributed by The Associated Press.