A year after the illegal incursion and sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10, Argentina’s Federal Fishing Council issued a little-noticed announcement: It was granting fishing licenses to two foreign vessels that would allow them to operate within Argentine waters. Both would sail under the Argentine flag through a local front company, but their true “beneficial” owner was CNFC.

This decision was noteworthy because it seemed to violate Argentine regulations that not only forbid foreign-owned ships from flying Argentina’s flag or fishing in its waters but also prohibit the granting of fishing licenses to ship operators with records of illegal fishing in Argentine waters. “The decision was a total contradiction,” says Eduardo Pucci, a former Argentine fisheries minister who now works as a fishing consultant.

The move by local authorities may have been a contradiction, but it is an increasingly common one in Argentina and elsewhere around the world. In recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has been buying its way into restricted national fishing grounds, primarily using a process known as “flagging in.” This method typically involves the use of business partnerships to register foreign ships under the flag of another country, thereby allowing those vessels to fish in that country’s territorial waters.

Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial squid-fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag, which constitute most of the country’s squid fleet. These companies have been tied to a variety of crimes, including turning off their transponders and engaging in tax evasion and fraud. Some also engage in “high-grading,” which entails dumping old fish overboard and replacing it with new fish to circumvent quotas. The practice is illegal because it is wasteful and helps to drive the collapse of fish stocks.

Trade records show that much of what is caught by these vessels is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to countries including the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain. The Chinese fishing industry overall also exports large amounts of seafood to companies based in Massachusetts.

Beyond Argentine waters, China also now operates almost 250 of these flagged-in vessels in the waters of countries including the Federated States of Micronesia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and even Iran.

Most national fisheries require vessels to be owned locally to keep profits within the country and make it easier to enforce fishing regulations. Flagging in undermines those aims, says Duncan Copeland, the executive director of Trygg Mat Tracking, a nonprofit research organization specializing in maritime crime. And aside from the sovereignty and financial concerns, food security is also undermined by the export of this vital source of affordable protein, explains Dyhia Belhabib, a principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada, a charity focused on environmental activism.

These hundreds of industrial fishing ships also complicate China’s ocean conservation goals. In 2017, after pressure from environmental groups about overfishing, Beijing announced that it would cap the size of its distant-water fleet at 3,000 vessels. But that tally does not take into account the large and growing number of industry ships that China owns and flags in to other countries.

Over the past three decades, China has gained supremacy over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 distant-water ships — which is more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet. When it came to targeting other countries’ waters, Chinese fishing ships typically sat “on the outside,” parking in international waters along sea borders and then running incursions into domestic waters. In recent years, China has increasingly taken a “softer” approach, gaining control from the inside by paying to flag in their ships so they can fish in domestic waters. Subtler than simply entering foreign coastal areas to fish illegally, the tactic — which is often legal — is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels.

China has not hidden how this approach factors into larger ambitions. In an academic paper published in 2023, Chinese fishery officials explained that they have relied extensively on Chinese companies, for example, to penetrate Argentina’s territorial waters through “leasing and transfer methods,” and that this is part of a global policy.

The trend is especially pronounced in Africa, where Chinese companies operate flagged-in ships in the national waters of at least nine countries on the continent. Among them, notably, is Ghana, where more than 135 Chinese fishing ships flying the Ghanaian flag are fishing in national waters, even though foreign investment in fishing is technically illegal. Up to 95 percent of Ghana’s industrial trawling fleet has some element of Chinese control, according to a 2018 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, an advocacy group.

China also has a growing presence across the Pacific Ocean. Chinese ships comb the waters of Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Micronesia, having flagged in to or signed access agreements with those countries, according to a report released in 2022 by the US Congressional Research Service. “Chinese fleets are active in waters far from China’s shores,” the report warned, “and the growth in their harvests threatens to worsen the already dire depletion in global fisheries.”

Endangering food security

As global demand for seafood has doubled since the 1960s, the appetite for fish has outpaced what can be sustainably caught. Now, more than a third of the world’s stocks have been overfished. To meet the demand, the proliferation of foreign industrial fishing ships, especially from China, risks collapsing domestic fish stocks of countries in the Global South while also jeopardizing local livelihoods and compromising food security by exporting an essential source of protein. Western consumers, particularly in Europe, the United States, and Canada, are beneficiaries of this cheap and seemingly abundant seafood caught or processed by China.

“It’s a net transfer from poorer states who don’t have the capacity to protect their fisheries to richer states who just want cheaper food products,” says Isaac B. Kardon, senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But ocean sustainability and food security are by no means the only concerns tied to the growth of China’s control of global seafood and penetration into foreign near-shore waters. Labor abuses and other crimes are a widespread problem on Chinese fishing ships.

In January 2019, as part of a four-year investigation, a team of reporters from The Outlaw Ocean Project boarded a Chilean fishing ship in Punta Arenas, Chile, where the crew recounted having recently watched a Chinese captain on a nearby squid ship punching and slapping deckhands. Later that year, the same team of journalists were reporting at sea off the coast of the West African nation of Gambia, where they boarded a Chinese ship called the Victory 205. There they found six African crew members sleeping on sea-soaked foam mattresses in a cramped and dangerously hot crawl space above the engine room of the ship — which was soon detained by local authorities for these labor and other violations.

In February 2022, the reporters boarded a Chinese squid jigger on the high seas near the Falkland Islands, where an 18-year-old Chinese deckhand nervously begged to be rescued, explaining that his and the other workers’ passports had been confiscated. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” he asked. Roughly four months later, the reporting team climbed aboard another Chinese fishing ship in international waters near the Galapagos Islands to document living conditions. As if in suspended animation, the crew of 30 men wore thousand-yard stares. Their teeth were yellowed from smoking, their skin ashen, and their hands spongy from handling fresh squid. The walls and floors were covered in slippery ooze of squid ink. The deckhands said they worked 15-hour days, six days per week. Mostly, they stood shin-deep in squid, monitoring the reels to ensure they did not jam, and tossing their catch into overflowing baskets for later sorting. Below deck, a cook stirred instant noodles and bits of squid in a rice cooker. He said the vessel had run out of vegetables and fruit — a common cause at sea of fatal malnutrition.

In June 2023, the same reporters were contacted by Uruguayan authorities seeking help after a local woman stumbled across a message in a bottle washed ashore, apparently thrown from a Chinese squidder. “I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765 and I was locked up by the company,” the message read. “When you see this paper, please help me call the police! Help, help.” For most of the past decade, on average one dead body has been dropped off every other month in the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, mostly from Chinese squid ships. Some of the workers on these ships have died from beriberi, an easily avoidable and reversible form of malnutrition caused by a vitamin B1 deficiency that experts say is a warning sign of criminal neglect, typically caused on ships by eating too much white rice or instant noodles, which lack the vitamin. At least 24 workers on 14 Chinese fishing ships suffered symptoms associated with beriberi between 2013 and 2021, according to a recent investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project. Of those, at least 15 died. The investigation also documented dozens of cases of forced labor, wage theft, violence, the confiscation of passports, and deprivation of medical care.

Many of these crimes have taken place on the high seas, beyond any country’s territorial jurisdiction. But increasingly, Chinese-owned vessels are fishing in the local waters of nations where policing is little better, because governments lack the finances, the coast guard vessels, or the political will to board and spot-check the ships.

How China spreads its influence

To help create jobs, make money, and feed the country’s growing middle class, the Chinese government heavily supports its fishing industry with billions of dollars in subsidies for things like fuel discounts, shipbuilding, and engine purchases. The Chinese fishing companies flagging in to poorer countries’ waters are also eligible for these subsidies. “The reason why the Chinese subsidize these fleets could be not only for the fish,” says Fernando Rivera, chairman of the Argentine Fishing Industry Chamber. “It has a very important geopolitical aspect.”

As US and European fishing fleets and navies have shrunk, so too has Western development funding and market investment in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific. This has created a void that China is filling as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global development program. Between 2000 and 2020, China’s trade with Latin America and the Caribbean grew from $12 billion to $315 billion, according to the World Economic Forum. China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, two major state-owned Chinese banks, provided $137 billion in loans to Latin American governments between 2005 and 2020. In exchange, China has received exclusive access to a wide range of resources, from oil fields to lithium mines.

The maritime domain is an important front in China’s growth plans, which include not just exerting power over the high seas and contested waters like those in the South China Sea but also consolidating control over shipping, fishing in foreign coastal waters, and ports abroad. According to research by Kardon at the Carnegie Endowment, Chinese companies now operate dozens of overseas processing plants and cold-storage facilities, and terminals in more than 90 foreign fishing or shipping ports abroad.

Though most of these business ventures go unnoticed, some of them have sparked controversy. Starting in 2007, China extended more than a billion dollars’ worth of loans to Sri Lanka as part of a plan for a Chinese state-owned company to build a port and an airport. The deal was made based on the promise that the project would generate more than enough revenue for Sri Lanka to pay back these loans. By 2017, however, the port and airport had not retired the debt, and Sri Lanka had no way to pay back the loan. China struck a new deal extending credit further. The deal gave China majority control over the port and the surrounding area for 99 years.

In 2018, a Chinese company purchased a 70-acre plot of land in Montevideo, Uruguay, to build a “megaport” consisting of two half-mile-long docks, a tax-exempt “free-trade zone,” a new ice factory, a ship-repair warehouse, a fuel depot, and dorms for staff. The plan was eventually canceled after local protests, but the Uruguayan government later announced that it would build the port itself, with foreign investment, and China’s ambassador, Wang Gang, expressed interest in managing the project.

More recently, in May 2021, Sierra Leone signed an agreement with China to build a new fishing harbor and fishmeal processing factory on a beach near a national park. In response, according to a 2023 report by The Stimson Center, local organizations pushed for more transparency around the deal, which they said would harm the area’s biodiversity.

The aftermath of the sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10

In Argentina, China has provided billions of dollars in currency swaps, providing a lifeline amid skyrocketing domestic inflation and growing hesitancy from other international investment and lending organizations. China has also made or promised billion-dollar investments in Argentina’s railway system, hydroelectric dams, lithium mines, and solar and wind power plants.

For Beijing, this money has created a variety of business opportunities. But it has also bought the type of political influence that became crucially important for the crew of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10, which Argentine authorities sank in 2016 for illegal fishing. All 29 of the men on the Chinese jigger were rescued from the water that day. Most of the men were scooped up by another Chinese fishing ship, Zhong Yuan Yu 11, which was also owned by CNFC and had its own history of illegal fishing in Argentine waters. These men were immediately taken back to China. Four of the crew, however, including the captain, were rescued by the Argentine Coast Guard, brought to shore, and charged with a range of crimes including violating fishing laws, resisting arrest, and endangering a coast guard vessel, and they were put under house arrest.

Roberto Wyn Hughes, a lawyer who frequently defends Chinese fishing companies, says that Argentine authorities typically would have allowed a Chinese company to pay a fine, after which its crew would be released. The sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was different, however, because it sparked a media storm in Argentina and could not be handled discreetly. Local news outlets described the ramming by the Chinese and showed footage of the sinking.

Hugo Sastre, the judge handling the case, initially asserted that the charges filed were justified. The Chinese officers had placed “both the life and property of the Chinese vessel itself and the personnel and ship of the Argentine Prefecture at risk,” he said. But China’s foreign ministry soon pushed back. A spokesman told reporters that he had “serious concerns” about the sinking and that his government had been engaged on behalf of the crew.

Three days later, the posture from the Argentine government began to shift. Susana Malcorra, Argentina’s foreign minister, told reporters that the charges had “provoked a reaction of great concern from the Chinese government.” She explained that she had reassured China that Argentina would follow local and international laws. “We hope it will not impact bilateral relations,” she told reporters. Several weeks later, the Argentine judiciary also fell in line. “Given the doubt that weighs on the facts and criminal responsibility” of the captain, he and the three other sailors would be released without penalty, the court announced. On April 7, 2016, the four Chinese crew members were flown back to China.

By May of that year, Argentina’s foreign minister was on a plane to Beijing to meet with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi. After their meeting, Yi hailed their countries’ “voyage of overall cooperation” and promised another surge of Chinese investment in Argentina. He added: “China will continue its support to the efforts made by Argentina in safeguarding its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Argentine captains, Chinese owners

Chinese political influence shows up on board the fishing vessels as well. The case of Manuel Quiquinte is illustrative. In the spring of 2021, Quiquinte, an Argentinian crew member on a squid jigger called the Xin Shi Ji 89, contracted COVID while at sea. The Chinese-owned ship was flagged in to Argentina and jigging in Argentinian waters. Its crew was a mix of Argentinian and Chinese workers. Several days after Quiquinte fell ill, the Argentine captain called the Chinese owners to ask if the ship could go to shore in Argentina to get medical care. Company officials said no and to keep fishing. Quiquinte died on the ship shortly thereafter.

In court papers tied to Quiquinte’s death, several of the ship’s Argentinian crew members explained that despite Argentine law forbidding non-Argentinians from being the captains or senior officers on these fishing ships, the reality is that the Chinese crew on board make the decisions. Even when they are designated on paper as lowly deckhands, the Chinese decide whether the ship will enter port to drop off a sick worker like Quiquinte. The Argentinians might be designated as the engineers on board, but they are not supposed to touch the machines once the vessel leaves port. “The only thing we do is to assume responsibility for any accident,” Fernando Daniel Marquez, the engineer on the Xin Shi Ji 89, said in the court documents.

On land and at sea, the Chinese use a variety of approaches to gain access to foreign waters and circumvent rules meant to protect local interests. In some countries, they sell or lease their ships to locals but retain control over decisions and profits. In other places where the governments forbid foreigners from fishing their waters, Chinese companies pay fees through “access agreements.” Elsewhere, China has gone around the prohibitions on foreign shipowners by partnering with local residents and giving them a majority ownership stake.

Typically about a quarter of the workers on fishing ships owned by the Chinese operating in Argentinian waters are Chinese nationals, according to a review of about a dozen crew manifests published by local media. Jorge Frias, the president of the Argentine fishing captains’ union, confirmed that on Argentine-flagged ships, the Chinese call the shots. The captains are Argentinians, but “fishing masters,” who are Chinese, decide where to go and when.

‘We have the enemy inside and out’

The scourge of illegal fishing and overfishing did not originate with China, of course. Western industrial fleets dominated the world’s oceans for much of the 20th century, fishing unsustainably in ways that have contributed to the current crisis, explains Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia.

China’s expansionist methods are also not historically unique. The United States has a long and infamous record of intervening abroad when foreign leaders begin enacting highly protectionist laws. In the past several decades, the tactic of flagging in has also been used by American and Icelandic fishing companies. More recently, as China has increased its control over global fishing, the United States and European nations have often sought to focus international attention on China’s misdeeds. When criticized in the media, China typically pushes back, not without reason, by dismissing the criticism as politically motivated and by accusing its detractors of hypocrisy.

Still, China has a well-documented reputation for violating international fishing laws and standards, bullying other ships, intruding on the maritime territory of other countries, and abusing its fishing workers. In 2021, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a nonprofit research group, ranked China as the world’s biggest participant in illegal fishing.

China’s sheer size, ubiquity, and poor track record on labor and marine conservation are raising concerns. In Ghana, for instance, industrial trawlers, most of which are owned by China, catch over 100,000 metric tons of fish per year, the Environmental Justice Foundation reported in 2017. The country’s fishing stocks are now in crisis, and local fishermen’s incomes have dropped by up to 40 percent over the last decade. “Fishing vessel owners and operators exploit African flags to escape effective oversight and to fish unsustainably and illegally both in sovereign African waters,” wrote Trygg Mat Tracking, the nonprofit that tracks maritime crime. It added that the companies are creating “a situation where they can harness the resources of a State without any meaningful restrictions or management oversight.” In the Pacific, an inspection in 2024 by local police and the US Coast Guard found that six Chinese flagged-in ships fishing in the waters of Vanuatu had violated regulations requiring them to record the amount of fish they catch.

And in South America, the increasing foreign presence in territorial waters is stoking nationalist worry in places like Peru and Argentina. “China is becoming the only player, by displacing local companies or purchasing them,” says Alfonso Miranda Eyzaguirre, a former Peruvian minister of production. Pablo Isasa, the captain of an Argentinian hake trawler, explains the situation this way: “We have the enemy inside and out.”

Ian Urbina is executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization in Washington, D.C. Pete McKenzie and Milko Schvartzman are journalists and fellows with The Outlaw Ocean Institute, which funds investigative work about practices at sea. Reporting was also contributed by Maya Martin, Jake Conley, Joe Galvin, Sue Ryan, Austin Brush, and Teresa Tomassoni of The Outlaw Ocean Project. Bellingcat also contributed reporting.