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.
That seems unlikely considering that Vietnam's entire coastline forms the western border of the South China Sea, so that's where they're most likely to fish. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia also border the sea and occasionally stop fishing boats in what they consider their territorial waters.
China probably has the largest fleet, but that doesn't mean the other countries are just watching them fish without doing anything.
OP/TFA implied that it was indeed Chinese, by encroaching on territorial waters and crowding out native fleets. At least that was my reading of the article and the above comment.
Yes, and I was arguing against that idea. The other countries didn't suddenly stop fishing in the area. And FWIW all of them are about equally "native" to the region, as in, people from all the surrounding coasts have been fishing there for centuries. Just the scale is new.
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.
Embedding surveillance and comms capabilities in fishing fleets is an old trick- there is even a reference in Wikipedia for the Soviets doing it in the 80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_ship).
That's not to dismiss it- the PLAN is almost certainly using the fishing fleet to expand its capabilities, and the giant size of the "invisible fleet" has national security implications for the region. The article touches on the use of the fishing fleet to assert Chinese claims to the Spratley islands and other contested regions, which is definitely a concern for regional stability.
How different is that from the US Coast Guard's (and especially regular merchant ships whose crews are part of the Coast Guard Reserve's) wartime function? I would suppose that all organized merchant-marine escort fleets are trained to cooperate/coordinate with their country's Navy; if not just to "get the heck out of the way, this area is about to be under attack."
Also, AFAIK, it's a de-facto "law of the sea" that pretty much all ships with transponders—no matter the flag they fly—will willingly act as relays for other ships that cannot communicate, in order to facilitate search-and-rescue. Same with planes. It's a whole part of their signalling codes.
It's quite interesting to see those fleet being analyzed and claimed to be "more closely integrated", while the PLA is still trying to push their new "Military and civilian integration" (军民融合) concept by copying how US did it. Are they that fast at embracing and enhancing?
>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.
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.
>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
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.
> 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.
The OP gives an example:
> In the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands have attracted most attention as the Chinese government has built artificial islands on reefs and shoals in these waters, militarizing them with aircraft strips, harbours and radar facilities. Chinese fishing boats bolster the effort by swarming the zone, intimidating potential competitors, as they did in 2018, suddenly dispatching more than 90 fishing ships to drop anchor within several miles of Philippines-held Thitu Island, immediately after Manila began modest upgrades on the island's infrastructure.
Other obvious uses are espionage, observation, and covert transportation.
I'm not expert on air routes but Bangkok to Tokyo sounds like it would go over the North part of the South China Sea, near Hainan then along the coast of China. So not really where the flashpoints are.
Not sure what would be frightening and shocking apart perhaps from the potential overfishing, which is unfortunately widespread worldwide.
I'm sure that Vietnam, especially, and other neighbouring countries also have extensive fishing fleets in the South China Sea at large.
It goes a little farther south and then hangs a right turn to fly toward BKK from due East. So this was more from the south-central portion of the region. The "shocking" part was just the astounding number of vessels, stretching beyond the horizon.
Depending on where you were it might be the Japanese fishing fleet as well.
At night, the footprint of the Japanese fishing fleet in lights can expand the apparent size of the Japanese islands by what seems like double the area.
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.
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... , 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/... 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).
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.
The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history. It’s the League of Nations with better PR.
Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees.
The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd.
> The UN hasn’t prevented nuclear war, it’s accomplished virtually nothing in its long history.
Last "nuclear war" was on 9 August 1945.
UN formed on 24 October 1945.
> Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees.
Yes, it does. If they have large militaries and/or economies.
> The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd.
No, it wouldn't. The point of the UN is to avoid war, not to spread democracy [1]. The structure of the UN is a consequence of that aim.
There hasn’t been a nuclear war since the Cleveland Rams last NFL championship. The correlation is just as apt.
As far as preventing war in general, the Korean War, Vietnam, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Falklands, two gulf wars, Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc, etc. UN mediation is no more effective than any other major power mediation efforts in history, in fact it can be argued the UN has been less effective.
The key method to avoiding war is to spread democracy, which is why the UN is such a failure, and it’s charter is the prime reason.
Would learning that the diplomatic channels of the UN were some of the methods used to relay information during, for example, the Cuban middle crisis change your opinion? The comparison seems to lack historical context, the UN has been involved into international diplomatic actions relating to nuclear war far more than any footballers.
I think the “spreading democracy” mindset is wholly unsubstantiated, as most of the wars you mentioned were predicated on either preserving or spreading democracy. If we need war to prevent war, it seems that there can be no peace.
Yes, but valuearb makes a good point— it is not always true that a bad peace is better than a good war. There are moments when timely, preemptive military intervention can avoid a more destructive conflict. (The problem is, of course, that those moments are often only obvious to us in historical retrospect.)
Yes and no. Yes, there is not real peace, and there is not peace even within such nations. That difference (between authoritarian and non-authoritarian) matters.
But no, even with authoritarian regimes in existence, there is a difference between "shooting war" and "no shooting war". That difference matters, too.
You see how that language was carefully crafted with "develop" and "promote" / "encourage", vs the "maintain" and "take" in Article 1.1 and portions dealing with peace?
The UN exists to prevent war between great powers. All else is subordinate to that goal.
> The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes.
That's like saying that the House of Representatives would be far more effective if it took away the right to vote from Representatives you don't agree with.
That would simply be the end of the UN. Countries are sovereign and if they lose their voice in the UN they would just leave it and ignore it.
Right, I’m saying the UN is ineffectual and corrupt and needs to be ended. Countries already are sovereign, and already freely ignore the toothless UN.
And no, its like saying we should take away the right to vote from Representatives who used corruption and murder to rig their own elections.
The UN is a paper tiger by design, at the core its nothing more then a forum for UN permanent members to talk with each other.
And to make sure red lines are well defined and not accidentally being crossed.
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.
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.
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.
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.