A recent social media post served as a reminder of how the maritime environment is changing, in ways that will have an impact on the big nations’ strategic maritime postures, and will shape tactics and opportunities in coming conflicts.
This article deals with only one aspect of that, and I am laboring to keep it short and to the point. So I’m linking considerable background material and asking readers to consult it, rather than using a lot of verbiage in this article to lay out facts. What I want to do here is advance a little analysis, based on the topic of China’s global fishing fleet.
The social media post is from 17 July 2023, and was copied to a tweet sent the following day.
Trolls showed up quickly to mock and dismiss the information about the seeming “floating cities” of the Chinese fishing fleet, a visual effect created by the vessels’ gaggling practices and use of lights to attract certain kinds of catch.
But the phenomenon is well documented and has been expanding for years. In the case highlighted this month, the fishing fleet was off Argentina’s Patagonia region in the south, where the fishing industry lurks in pursuit of a particular kind of squid.
There’s all kinds of background on it, including short videos with dramatic views of the fleet’s lights at night compiled by watchdog groups such as Sea Shepherd.
A few map graphics are worth several thousand words to convey the essentials
This overview depicts the heavily trafficked “Atlantic Blue Hole” fishing area, with a couple of Argentine coastal landmarks from this recent article labeled.
This one is zoomed in to show an especially persistent gaggle (the bright blob) of foreign fishing activity in the “Blue Hole.”
Note that the foreign fleets – which observers confirm are almost entirely composed of China’s – are detected by remote means mostly outside Argentina’s EEZ. Outside the Argentine EEZ, they can fish unfettered by the policies of Buenos Aires.
However, another monitoring group, Oceana, has documented a practice of dozens of Chinese fishing vessels “going dark” – turning off their AIS transmitters – on a regular basis, corresponding with forays inside the Argentine EEZ.
In fact, equally worrisome or even more so, fishing vessels are observed faking identities among themselves to confuse the remote, automated picture of their activities presented by AIS tracking.
The next graphic shows phyloplankton blooms that attract the prized squid, in an image captured in 2021. The blue and green shaded areas are the concentrations of phyloplankton.
The image in the social media post of 17 July (top) appears to actually be from a composite graphic produced by NASA and NOAA in 2012. That image was eye-opening at the time, clarifying the sheer size of what look like “floating cities” of fishing vessels compared to the brightly-lit urban areas ashore.
I worked with the image to brighten it and improve the contrast so the locations of the “floating cities” would be clearer.
And this graphic shows updated observations of fishing vessel concentrations compiled by Global Fishing Watch nine years later, in 2021.
The next pair of graphics gives another view of the dramatic increase in Chinese fishing vessel presence around the world from 2012 to 2020.
Note the barely visible presence off Argentina in 2012 (falling just where NASA and NOAA saw the “floating city” lights) as compared to the much-expanded presence in 2020. The same can of course be seen in the Central Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
As assessed in the Navy study for the Congressional Research Service (last link) and an Army article in 2021, the primary intent of China’s huge and increasing fishing presence around the world is, in fact, to fish. The fishing is as much about feeding China as about profit from foreign sales. And overfishing is a significant concern for the nations whose EEZs and fish populations feel the impact of Chinese industry.
But the U.S. services correctly perceive the military implications of the busy, active, and often intentionally deceptive Chinese fishing fleet profile in the world’s oceans. The Army treatment says this: “[T]he Chinese fishing fleets could meaningfully complicate the United States’ high-end capabilities through overt means (e.g., ISR&T [that is, surveillance, reconnaissance, etc.]) or through masking movement of military formations.”
Areas of obvious concern to U.S. and allied security would include the wholly new ramp-up of Chinese presence east of the Caribbean, as well as around Hawaii, bracketing Japan to the northeast and southwest, off Papua-New Guinea and Australia, and in the Arabian Sea outside the Persian Gulf.
China will fish, as everyone does, where the fish are. But where those locations are relevant to U.S. and allied security interests, they are a factor in military preparations and planning. To imagine that China doesn’t see clearly where military objectives can be advanced by a fishing presence is to spectacularly fail Analysis 101.
Some of the most useful reporting to date of how China’s fishing fleet does appear to engage in military-style surveillance and reconnaissance comes from observations off Hawaii. Again, rather than rehash other reporting here, I’m including links so readers can sample it for themselves.
But many readers will also be aware that China deploys a fleet of Maritime Militia ships with the fishing fleet. The vessels are typically fishing hulls used to protect the fishing fleet and exploit its deployment profiles to put a paramilitary presence in the waters being fished. To date, this practice has been mostly confined to the fisheries nearest to China’s territorial seas. But as with everything China has been undertaking in recent years, we can expect it to expand to all the areas fished by Chinese industry, the more quickly wherever there is the least pushback.
The remote areas of the Indian Ocean, Central and South Atlantic, and the eastern South Pacific, where the patrols of France and the Latin American nations taper off, are especially likely locations for increased presence by the Maritime Militia.
Applications
The features of the Chinese fishing phenomenon intersect with and can be relevant to maritime developments we have looked at in depth at TOC. One is the potential for a multilayered, stealth-strike missile threat to the U.S. and other nations exploiting Chinese access to foreign ports, carefully cultivated through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
As the U.S. military assessments suggest, the local activity and “noise” of the fishing fleet could be used to mask Chinese military movements, whether by literal military vessels, the Maritime Militia, or ostensibly civilian shipping being put to military use.
The existing practice of information warfare deception by the fishing fleet would integrate readily with electronic warfare involving deception with civilian versus military radars and satellite communication profiles. The underwater noise generated by deep-sea commercial fishing would also help mask the acoustic signatures of submarines and other high-value vessels deployed for military purposes.
Regarding the latter, for example, the Chinese fishing fleet in the Central and Southern Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea might mask the movements of submarines from which ballistic missiles could be launched, against which no nation, including the United States, is prepared for defense on those vectors.
There is no reason to assume China will cooperate with Western missile defense assumptions and confine itself to launching IRBMs, ICBMs, and long-range SLBMs from East Asia or even the Northern hemisphere.
Another recent development we looked at was the stealth approach of the Iranian naval task group in early 2023 to a port visit in Brazil, via a slow, low-profile progress across the South Pacific. That approach appears to have been facilitated by China as the Iranians wended their way through the island chains of Oceania.
And in the weeks just before the Iranians pulled into Rio de Janeiro, they apparently lurked undetected off the Atlantic coast of southern South America for a period of between 35 and 48 days.
As noted in that TOC article, an earlier Iranian task group, which went to the Baltic to visit Russia in 2021, appeared to make use of deceptive information ops, beyond simply shutting off AIS transmissions. On its approach to the key chokepoints of the Danish Straits and Strait of Gibraltar, evidence suggests the naval group adopted fake identities corresponding to other foreign shipping also observed in the area.
It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Iran’s 2022-23 task group to blend in with the Chinese fishing fleet for several weeks off the coast of Argentina. Such a ruse could work in a relatively remote area, with sufficient alertness and cooperation from the Chinese. Besides adopting deceptive electronic profiles, the “floating city” array of lights would obscure unusual hull outlines at night, and cueing from Chinese vessels would allow the Iranians to scurry away from approaching Argentine patrol assets and NGO monitoring vessels.
Again, such disgraceful deportment on the part of an oceangoing navy supposedly on a goodwill tour isn’t the point, so much as the feasibility of it and its potential application in future periods of tension and conflict. The noise and light show generated by the Chinese fishing fleet would be a ready enabler of such tactics.
One other consideration bears a mention. In the TOC article of 12 February 2023 (on China’s potential use of foreign ports to stage container-launched missiles; link above), one possibility discussed was that China might forward-stage multi-use vertical-tube missile launchers in foreign ports operated by China, including reclaimed-land and artificial island developments.
Common-use vertical-tube launchers are already programmed for Chinese fleet surface and submarine platforms. And China has a number of artificial island projects in various phases of development at foreign waterfronts, and has already demonstrated installing weapon systems on artificial islands in the South China Sea.
In this case, China could design launchers to lurk underwater until needed.
An afloat version of such an apparatus could be hidden with the vast “floating cities” of the fishing fleet as well. While there is no evidence of such specific planning, the concept of afloat forward bases in the world’s oceans is envisioned by all major navies, and for some fishing applications would make good sense. Nothing but an engineering project stands between a vision of this kind and its realization.
It bears observing that China already works in fishing using literal afloat villages in its own waters. The Chinese have also adopted a vision for “distant water fishing” (DWF) as part of the BRI (see here and here), and are actively pursuing the first foreign base for it in Papua-New Guinea. (The location is on the narrow Torres Strait between Papua-New Guinea and Australia, to the chagrin of leaders and planners in Canberra. See here and here as well.)
Other near or onshore bases are projected in China, but there have also been notices of a potential development in Pakistan. There are several likely locations in the Western hemisphere; a Chinese effort toward major participation in a fishing port being developed in Uruguay could represent one of them.
If China did not make maximum use of the fishing fleet for intelligence collection and certain forms of military positioning in the world’s oceans, it would be the only case of such restraint in any of the CCP’s planning and practices. There is nothing fanciful about suggesting developments to be on the lookout for.
Feature image: A Chinese squid jigger lit up against the night sky. The oceangoing squid jiggers are typically 140-200 feet long, with jigger lines on winches all down both the port and starboard sides, and bright lights used to attract the squid. Univision video via AP, YouTube.
The Optimistic Conservative 