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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

Let's call the largest operator of illegal fishing boats by its name: China

    > This Chinese fleet is also categorized by The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime as the largest purveyor of illegal fishing in the world. Our reporting revealed Chinese vessels illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law, breaking U.N. sanctions that prohibit foreigners fishing in North Korean waters, transmitting dual identities (or “spoofing”), finning of protected shark species, fishing without a license, and using prohibited gear.

https://time.com/6328528/investigation-chinese-fishing-fleet...

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Worth mentioning that the same cited report identifies South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine as #3, #6, #7 global worst offenders.

https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IUU-...

For flag state responsibility (Table 16), Taiwan (#2), South Korea (#4), Japan (#6), Spain (#7) are also among top-10 global worst offenders.

https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IUU-...

Don’t skip some and introduce your bias.

1 China 2 Russia 3 South Korea 4 Somalia 5 Yemen 6 Taiwan 7 Ukraine 8 Eritrean 9 Egypt 10 Lybia

I linked directly to the pages in the report containing the very tables you've copy-pasted. It's literally one click away.

In case it's not obvious, the entire point is that the actual statistics is not very convenient for the "good-guy v. bad-guy" framing. Why else would I only highlight countries considered in the US as part of the "good guys" camp?

While we're on this topic, US's own ranking drastically worsened between 2019 and 2021, from being #66 worst globally (see p.121) to #27 worst (see p. 111):

> When considering prevalence, five countries – South Korea, Seychelles, the USA, Senegal and Saint Vincent & the Grenadines – entered the list of worst-performing countries in 2021 for the first time, with China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and Ecuador remaining in the worst performers. (p.28)

How much worse is #1 to #3, and #6, on a per-capita basis?

It is worth noting the ranking is also weighted, and China consistently weights 25-30-% worse than #2 in each table. (For some reason your deep linking isn’t bringing me to the tables you’re referring to so not sure which specifically you’re referring to).

But you’re right - everyone is screwing the planet up in their own messed up ways. I think rather than making bogey men out of the “bad guys,” we should realize this fact. But with that fact realized, China does act with a particularly egregious lack of responsibility and accountability that belies their stature.

> China consistently weights 25-30-% worse than #2 in each table

I agree with your larger point, but I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. If you look at table 4 on p. 32 (i.e. printed page number; PDF page number is 21, and the complete data can be found at the end of the PDF, starting on (printed page number) p. 110), you'll see that the scores are derived from three indicators: (i) the prevalence of IUU (Illegal, unreported, and unregulated) fishing, (ii) each country's vulnerability to IUU fishing, and (iii) their response to it. Only in the Prevalence table for 2021 does China "weight 25-30% worse" than #2 (South Korea). In the Vulnerability table, China's score is only marginally worse (3.3-5%) than Japan, the second-worst in both 2019 and 2021. In the Response table, China (3.31) is not even among the top 10 worst countries, scoring comparably to Israel (3.29) and better than Singapore (3.87) and UAE (3.82).

Also worth noting: the Prevalence score is calculated based on the number of vessels recorded on IUU lists (see p.12), so we'd expect countries with a larger number of fishing vessells to score higher (i.e. worse) in respect of Prevalence, which is why even the US made it to #8 worst in the Prevalence table for 2021.

> For some reason your deep linking isn’t bringing me to the tables you’re referring to

I don't have the machine to test this right now, but it's possible that the ?page=N search parameter trick only works in Chromium.

This article also highlights the human-trafficking happening on these illegal fleets. Disturbing intersection of inhumane practices.

Slavery, presumably?

Apparently the vast majority of crews on normal legal global logistics shipping vessels are Phillipino. I wonder how many of the Chinese shark-murder slaver vessels are too.

The Global Slavery Index has estimates and as the article about China's fleets mentions North Korea, that hellish pit is obviously on #1 with >10% of the population in modern slavery https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/methodology/me...

The Association for Professional Observers maintains a list of observer deaths and disappearances [1] that is also disturbing.

[1]: https://www.apo-observers.org/observer-safety/misses/

Are these organized by some large state-run company, or is it a bunch of independent businesses exploiting the lack of enforcement?

Seems like it'd be hard for anyone to say with confidence given that we're only just now learning of the scale of their existence

This is definitely not the first I’ve heard of it.

An operation of this scale likely involves tens of thousands of people. Those people have families, are paid salaries, have grievances, etc.

In fact, bet a few of them are here on HN right now and could probably give us a first hand account while on the high seas trying to browse the only bit of the internet that still works with a 32kbps high latency internet connection...

Nah, they just use their Starlink connections

Red-Star Link

One account of out tens of thousands

What’s the difference? China is responsible either way

There aren't many large scale things happening in China without the state behind it and that's also the case here. The vessels are heavily subsidied.

The crux is: People require protein, daily. Feeding a population of 1.5 billion people requires quite a a lot of protein. Nothing leads more directly to civil unrest than hunger and famine.

That doesn't justify China for going all the way across the ocean to illegally fish on Chilean/Peruvian/Ecuador waters

I don't know anything about this particular issue, but generally from what I recall, Chinese companies are effectively the CCP by their own admission. They have full control.

About time coast guards start sinking these bastards on sight.

Isn't illegally entering another country's territory an act of war?

Sink the boats, problem solved. Presumably another, much larger, problem will be created. But the illegal fishing might stop.

Yeah, let's cut the arm out so the finger does not itch

It would only take a few examples to change behavior.

They often target countries that are not able to effectively police or defend their waters.

The ocean is so vast, few, if any, countries are able to monitor, let alone defend, their share of it at all times.

It's illegal fishing, not a ballistic missile submarine. Nobody needs to die over this.

Send in the coast guard, impound the ship, assess big fines. If the fines go unpaid, sell the ship.

Unless you’re able to impound a significant % of their fleet, their profits would still cover the losses and this wouldn’t serve as an effective deterrent. Sinking the ship, on the other hand, would make the crews really uneasy about going into your coastal waters. People don’t weigh probability of dying against a survivability of the whole fleet.

Not that simple: Most of these Chinese fishing boats are classified as Chinese Merchant Marines, a devision of the Chinese Military, so sinking them is an act of war. This is a real headache for managing illegal Chinese Fishing of Vietnam waters and other countries within the 9 and 11 dashed lines.

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