Unmasking China's Invisible Fleet
newsinteractives.cbc.ca
newsinteractives.cbc.ca
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.
[0] https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishi...
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.
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.
https://www.andrewerickson.com/2016/03/chinas-maritime-milit...
Also, AFAIK, it's a de-facto "law of the sea" that pretty much all ships with transponders—no matter the flag they fly—will willingly act as relays for other ships that cannot communicate, in order to facilitate search-and-rescue. Same with planes. It's a whole part of their signalling codes.
The encrypted military communication equipment they carry is designed works even during wartime operations under jamming.
How are they supposed to support the PLA navy if all they have is a boat with some military radios? The only thing I can think of is cannon fodder or search and rescue.
All of sudden there can be 50,000 or 100,000 ships carrying sea mines, underwater listening devices, depth charges, targeting systems or short range anti-ship missiles. Just like their merchant cargo ships they have some standardization that allows PLA to plan ahead what they can carry.
If USN carrier group must sail to help Taiwan in short notice and huge fleet of these ships just happen to stand in the way, then what? It's huge risk just to just assume that they are unarmed and sail trough, or that they have not mined the area. Just being able to provide targeting for Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles is a big problem.
Even if just 10% of them are armed, USN would have to sink or inspect every one of them to neutralize the threat. 7th fleet is not carrying enough anti-ship missiles board to take them down quickly.
Sounds like they're using civilian ships as human shields or cannon fodder to me. What's the legality of this? I feel like this would run afoul of some sort of international law requiring combatants to be identified[1], or preventing them from using civilians as human shields[2]. Can
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war#Lawful_conduct_of_b...
The OP gives an example:
> In the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands have attracted most attention as the Chinese government has built artificial islands on reefs and shoals in these waters, militarizing them with aircraft strips, harbours and radar facilities. Chinese fishing boats bolster the effort by swarming the zone, intimidating potential competitors, as they did in 2018, suddenly dispatching more than 90 fishing ships to drop anchor within several miles of Philippines-held Thitu Island, immediately after Manila began modest upgrades on the island's infrastructure.
Other obvious uses are espionage, observation, and covert transportation.
That's not to dismiss it- the PLAN is almost certainly using the fishing fleet to expand its capabilities, and the giant size of the "invisible fleet" has national security implications for the region. The article touches on the use of the fishing fleet to assert Chinese claims to the Spratley islands and other contested regions, which is definitely a concern for regional stability.
At night, the footprint of the Japanese fishing fleet in lights can expand the apparent size of the Japanese islands by what seems like double the area.
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.
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/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/... 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).
UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke (well, apart from peace keeping missions).
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.
If Europe wants to be taken seriously, it can't just be the French having a medium sized stick to back their soft power.
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.
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.
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.
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#...
As far as preventing war in general, the Korean War, Vietnam, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Falklands, two gulf wars, Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc, etc. UN mediation is no more effective than any other major power mediation efforts in history, in fact it can be argued the UN has been less effective.
The key method to avoiding war is to spread democracy, which is why the UN is such a failure, and it’s charter is the prime reason.
I think the “spreading democracy” mindset is wholly unsubstantiated, as most of the wars you mentioned were predicated on either preserving or spreading democracy. If we need war to prevent war, it seems that there can be no peace.
But no, even with authoritarian regimes in existence, there is a difference between "shooting war" and "no shooting war". That difference matters, too.
As anyone who's ever had a war fought on their soil will tell you.
When was the last time a war has been fought on your country's soil? How many times since then has your country brought war to another's?
Your opinion might change were you on the receiving end of these adventures.
This statement remains unsubstantiated, and is furthermore argued against by the wars originally provided in the general context of the quote.
That's like saying that the House of Representatives would be far more effective if it took away the right to vote from Representatives you don't agree with.
That would simply be the end of the UN. Countries are sovereign and if they lose their voice in the UN they would just leave it and ignore it.
And no, its like saying we should take away the right to vote from Representatives who used corruption and murder to rig their own elections.
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.
Which were responsible for the Haiti cholera outbreak as well as its cover-up. The UN is worse than useless.
[1] https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/
Edited to include author name
Not entirely accurate. There's lots of blame to go around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Always thought I tasted a difference. This explains a lot.