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Comment by evancox100 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else catch this? First:

“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.

Several paragraphs later:

“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“

Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?

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According to the 13th Five-Year Plan for the National Fishing Industry http://www.moa.gov.cn/nybgb/2017/derq/201712/t20171227_61312... China had 65398 sea-going fishing boats with a length of at least 12 meters in 2015 and planned to reduce that number to 57095 in 2020. The number of distant-water fishing vessels is given as 2512 in 2015, but I can't find anything to substantiate the claim that it's supposed to be limited to at most 3000 by 2021 (though I didn't read the whole plan, so maybe I missed it). EDIT: Turns out I should have looked at the five-year plan for distant-water fishing specifically, which does say that the number of vessels should be stabilized below 3000 by 2020 and also mentions that at the end of 2016, there were close to 2900 either already deployed or under construction http://www.moa.gov.cn/gk/ghjh_1/201712/t20171227_6128624.htm

Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.

same reason you would lie about the total amount of vessels in the first place.

here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariellasimke/2020/08/09/over-20...

it's not "inconsistent propaganda" it's under-reporting and outright lying, which is par for the course when it comes to the CCP.

I think people ascribe motive to a lot of Chinese behavior, where it's probably more an issue of perspective.

In China, as near as I can tell, 2-3 generations have been raised with the understanding that truth is always subordinate to the goals of the CCP. In fact, if not in abstract.

That's one thing, internal to a country. That's very different when you're talking international diplomacy.

And yet it seems like China follows this exact playbook in that arena too.

It has to make for some awkward conversations when a diplomat is swearing (and believing, inasmuch as doublethink is possible) that the fleet numbers X, when another country is providing literal evidence that it's 5X.

It can be difficult to orchestrate years and layers of adjusted statistics to tell a consistent story.

Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.

Command economies are nation-scale examples of Goodhart's law.

I have no horse in this race, and may even be persuaded to agree with you, but as other commenters pointed out, the statements in themselves are not logically inconsistent.

The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.

>Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?

That's the thing about lies.

At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.

The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.

I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.

Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.

Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?

The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.

We don't even know if the above comment's observation is accurate or not.

You are basing your entire observation on an inaccurate translation.

Eh, my observation is about a recurring behavior from China.

Could it be an inaccurate translation? Yes.

Is China abusing their fishing fleets and actively try to dismiss that? Yes.

Is China actively implicated in lies and deception, and are observed doing it? Yes.

Sorry there are a lot of emotions in your comment but very little substance.

>Eh, my observation is about a recurring behavior from China

Can you clarify which behaviour you are referring to? It's been pointed out that the Chinese goal was to stabilize their fishing fleet size to around 3000, which given their normal growth focused policies seemed like some thing worthy of planning. And not propaganda as the parent comment was implying

Restrict =/= reduce

Why would they need a 5 year plan to "restrict" their already goal-achieving fleet size if it was not for reducing?

To limit future growth?

The "by" in "by 2021" implies the restriction is currently in breach. This may be a matter of translation differences, but I doubt it. It's more likely that the lying left hand doesn't have its story straight with the lying right hand of the CCP propaganda units.

You're going to base your argument on one word of a summary from somebody else of a statement made in a different language?

If you're that itchy for a quarrel, just have at it.

There's no source for either of those claims though.

Furthermore, it says restrict to under 3000, while you have changed it to reduce.

It's true. Here is the 13th 5-year plan by the Ministry of Agriculture. It does say "总数稳定在3000", which means to stabilize the number of vessels.

http://jiuban.moa.gov.cn/zwllm/ghjh/201712/t20171221_5985078...

Also for more details about the ODI estimate: https://www.cffacape.org/publications-blog/how-large-is-the-...

Most likely they're interpreting vessels operating in disputed 9dash eez as DWF instead of domestic fleet. So they magically discovered 12,490 new ships not claimed by China, which would not consider them DWF vessels. See table on page 15 of report.

> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.

AND

>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018

CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.

Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.

https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-document...

[1] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...

As with all numbers coming out of the CCP - a healthy dose of skepticism is required. Just like with the Soviet Union's Politburo - all stats and numbers are curated to fit the public face the CCP wishes to present for global consumption.

A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.

Your previous comment that said this is flagged and dead. It's not good practice to repost it, even if you add a bit of text that is still not fact based.

Shanghai's population size is 23-24 million, it is undisputed. They have a plan to limit that to 25 million by 2035.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-shanghai-population...

According to your logic, they are lying about the population size of Shanghai as well? LOL

For boats, natural state is a static population. Boats don’t reproduce. This is where the comparison falls apart

What? Cannot boats be manufactured at all?

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