
Unmasking China's Invisible Fleet - marvinpinto
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/china-at-sea
======
vbtemp
I know this article is about the waters off Korea, but I noticed a similar
thing flying over the South China Sea, in particular the Tokyo-Bangkok route.

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.

~~~
nabla9
Many of those ships have crews that are part of the People’s Armed Forces
Maritime Militia (PAFMM). The militia are organized and commanded directly by
the PLA's local military commands. They don't normally carry weapons, but they
have military communications equipment and readiness to support PLA Navy.

[https://www.andrewerickson.com/2016/03/chinas-maritime-
milit...](https://www.andrewerickson.com/2016/03/chinas-maritime-militia-our-
most-extensive-detailed-analysis-yet/)

~~~
gruez
>They don't normally carry weapons, but they have military communications
equipment and readiness to support PLA Navy.

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.

~~~
nabla9
They are normally unarmed, but when it can all change at any time. It's hard
to notice when that change is happening.

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.

~~~
gruez
>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.

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war#Lawful_conduct_of_belligerent_actors)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_(law)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_\(law\))

~~~
Nexxxeh
If they are, and one were to draw up a list of other human rights violations
and international laws that China is breaking, I don't think this would make
the top five.

------
oefrha
Something is a bit fishy (okay I’m stretching this a bit).

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.

~~~
yorwba
The word "research" in the preceding paragraph is a link to said research, and
the full text is available here:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/)

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...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/table/T1/)
, 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/...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990315/figure/F1/)
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).

------
sradman
China and North Korea appear to have a side-deal for fishing rights which
violates U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea.

~~~
me_me_me
I think UN should have a vote about it to decide on the panelty. Oh wait, it
was veto'ed again.

UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke (well, apart from peace
keeping missions).

~~~
xoa
> _UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke_

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.

~~~
Roritharr
Very well put. It's one of the things I decry often when talking about
european politics.

If Europe wants to be taken seriously, it can't just be the French having a
medium sized stick to back their soft power.

~~~
me_me_me
Europe is one of the biggest economical block, there is already a lot of soft
power EU can exert via tariffs and bans.

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.

------
qchris
If you haven't read the book written by the NYTimes journalist Ian Urbina that
much of the original research this article refers to, I highly, highly
recommend it [1]. Not only is it illuminating, but the writing and stories
within it are extremely compelling on a human level as well. I got a copy of
it over the holidays, and literally experienced the trope of having a hard
time putting it down.

[1] [https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-
ocean/](https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/)

Edited to include author name

------
generatorguy
A fisherman I was speaking to in NZ noted on their ships radar lines of
trawlers just outside NZ waters presumably doing the same thing - dragging
nets between the trawlers and indiscriminately taking everything - or bottom
trawling and mowing the sea floor flat and void of life. It is the tragedy of
the commons that we can't manage this shared renewable resource. Canada has
destroyed their Atlantic fisheries. If they can't manage not to take every
fish in the ocean I'm not surprised the rest of the world can't resist it
either.

~~~
mthoms
>Canada has destroyed their Atlantic fisheries

Not entirely accurate. There's lots of blame to go around:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery#/media/File:Time_series_for_collapse_of_Atlantic_northwest_cod.png)

From:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery)

------
jvanderbot
In a trip to south africa, entire sections of some cities were being "bought"
by China. In retaliation, locals occasionally refuse to sell fuel to Chinese
fishing vessels, which, like those in TFA, were there illegally.

------
5m17h
老外又在黑中国了

------
dirtyid
>Critics also accuse China of keeping high-quality squid for domestic
consumption, exporting lower-quality products at higher prices.

Always thought I tasted a difference. This explains a lot.

