China is at it again, doing the only thing they have ever known how to do: looting and plundering. And it's not just their neighbors who are the victims this time.
Earlier this week, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping issued a speech emphasizing the importance of conservation on the "Tibet-Qinghai Plateau (1)." Xinhua treated this speech the way they treat anything else from Xi: as though it was some kind of Divine Revelation. As for me, I found this talk of "protecting biodiversity" to be as hypocritical as anything else any Chinese leader has ever said, especially considering that earlier this month it was announced that a fleet of Chinese fishing vessels has spent the last three years sweeping across the seas of Argentina, plundering the sea of its entire bounty of fish...
...At night, in Argentinian waters, with their transponders turned off to hide their presence (Woody; Lew).
Now, Chinese fishing boats in waters that don't belong to China are nothing new. Just ask their "affectionate friends," the North Koreans.
The battered wooden “ghost boats” drift through the Sea of Japan for months, their only cargo the corpses of starved North Korean fishermen whose bodies have been reduced to skeletons. Last year more than 150 of these macabre vessels washed ashore in Japan, and there have been more than 500 in the past five years.
For years the grisly phenomenon mystified Japanese police, whose best guess was that climate change pushed the squid population farther from North Korea, driving the country’s desperate fishermen dangerous distances from shore, where they become stranded and die from exposure.
But an NBC News investigation, based on new satellite data, has revealed what marine researchers now say is a more likely explanation: China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, violently displacing smaller North Korean boats and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks of more than 70 percent.
-Ian Urbina, NBC News
[T]he Chinese people's friendly affection with the people of the DPRK will not change, and China's support for socialist DPRK will not change.
-Xi Jinping, quoted Mo Jingxi, ChinaDaily in 2018 (during the years when China was plundering North Korea's waters this way).
It's worthy of note that this fishing in North Korea, which is defined as economic activity, is in violation of UN Sanctions, sanctions which China themselves signed off on (Wu). Although I don't think the North Koreans who have been attacked and driven from their own waters by Chinese pirates care, nor do the North Koreans who have been condemned to starvation by China's raids upon their fishing stock.
And mind you, this is how China treats an "ally." If anyone needed any further proof that China's definition of "ally" is more like "broken, demoralized, utterly submissive vassal state living in constant fear of the self-anointed 'Central Nation,' " look no further. But I digress. Let's get back to the current victim of China's predations: Argentina.
Of course, Argentina has a history of having to deal with Chinese poachers plundering their fish stocks. In 2016, there was an incident where one Chinese fishing vessel refused the Argentinian Coast Guard's orders to withdraw so many times that the ACG had to open fire, which might explain why the Chinese vessels are turning off their transponders now in a desperate attempt to hide their actions from a nation that will actually stand up to them (hey Duterte, are you taking notes?). As it turned out, the vessel fired on by the Argentinian Coast Guard had a long history of similar violations (Godfrey).
In 2019, the same thing happened again, and Chinese State Media performed some impressive contortions trying to twist the story from "we committed a knowing, willful crime and got caught" into "Argentina needs to be clearer about their boundaries."
China said it will not be partial on this issue if it is confirmed and hopes that the Argentine side provides its boundary coordinates to avoid similar incidents from happening.
-Global Times Staff
One must admire the lengths to which China will go to avoid admitting fault.
Though Argentina is the most recent victim of this mass piracy by fleets of Chinese locusts, and though they have endured it for five years, they are not by any means the first. All of South America has been prey to this assault by China, and though China has promised to quit, Oceana's distant-water fishing expert, Phillip Chou, has said there's no evidence that their promises have gone beyond empty words (Collyns). Ecuador's Galapagos Islands have been so heavily plundered by these criminals that the mayor of the Ecuadorian city of Santa Cruz called it the "rape" of the Galapagos (Associated Press). If one uses that description, then China is serial rapist with a lengthy history of victims.
Earlier I mentioned that North Korea, one of China's only two treaty allies, has been a victim of the same predations. So it should come as no surprise that South Korea was next on China's menu after they squeezed North Korea dry (Park).
Indonesia has grown so weary of it that they've taken to confiscating illegal Chinese vessels and sinking them (Maritime Executive Staff).
Japan, which is almost always at the top of China's list of targets for bullying, has been a victim of this as well (Kentaro).
Malaysia seized six of these not-so-jolly-rogers in 2020 (Kyodo), and this is not their first time pushing back against these Chinese ecological attacks (Tan).
Even the tiny South Pacific island nations of Palau (Carreon) and Vanuatu (Agence France-Presse) have grown so sick of it that they are standing up to China, echoing a sentiment shown by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2018.
The Philippines have been subjected to a unique twist on this uniquely Chinese tactic, as the "fishing vessels" plundering their waters are actually ramming trawlers of the so-called "People's Maritime Militia," which I have written about before. This explains why Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Teddy Locsin lost his patience to the point that he publicly tweeted to China "get the fuck out," and went on to call China the "ugly oaf" that was responsible for destroying the Sino-Filipino friendship (Reuters).
This, by the way, raises the question of whether China's fishing fleets preying on any of the other countries mentioned here have actually been militia vessels in disguise, acting in tandem with their PLA overseers, on PLA orders. That is a question for which I currently have no answers, but it bears investigation because if the answer turns out to be "yes," then the crimes of these massive fishing fleets cease to be an act of piracy and become an act of ecological warfare, a technique described by two PLA Senior Colonels in 1999 (Qiao and Wang, 54).
And of course, Africa, where China attempts to act as a neo-imperialist colonial patron, has been the victim of this practice for years. In 2019, Wathi noted instances of Chinese fish-poaching off the coasts of Cameroon, Mozambique, and Nigeria, all with the at least tacit approval (if not direct orders, as many suspect) of the Chinese government, while China's embassy said nothing, and said it loudly. In 2018 it was reported that Sierra Leone loses $50 million annually to illegal Chinese fishing, and that's no small amount of lost revenue (or food) for a country as small and impoverished as Sierra Leone (Kamara). This $50 million pales in comparison to the $2.3 billion annually that is lost to these Chinese vultures by other African nations combined, according to the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. (Farge).
So, why are China's fishing fleets cruising around the world stealing food from the mouths of every nation known to mankind? As far back as 2015, The New York Times's Andrew Jacobs cited a landmark Greenpeace study in a report that offers an answer offers an answer.
Chinese fishing fleets, driven by plummeting catches close to home, are flocking to distant West African waters, where they engage in ecologically ruinous bottom trawling, subterfuge and other illegal activities that threaten marine resources.
So there is the answer. China is running out of food because their sprawling population of slobbering peasants have already gorged themselves on everything they can catch in their own waters, so now they've decided they're entitled to everyone else's.
In 2019 I wrote an article outlining the rather startling proof of a food crisis in China. In 2020, this crisis reached a point where China could no longer hide it, and Xi had to issue orders to conserve food (Dou). Gordon Chang wrote in Newsweek in March that the insecure Communist Party and the spoiled child who rules it, Xi Jinping, would likely become aggressive in the near future in a desperate attempt to alleviate this food shortage. It seems the only thing Chang and I got wrong is that we were several years late. China has already been prowling around, stealing food and decimating every eco-system on Earth to compensate for their inability to produce their own food.
But the most laughably ironic (and classically Chinese) part of it all, is the fact that the culprit of all this illegal fishing, China, has recently announced a ban on foreign fishing in their own seas. Or rather, not "their own" seas, but the seas of the Philippines and Vietnam, illegally claimed by China's nine dash lie (Zhou). And they're brutal about enforcing it as well. Echoing their treatment of the Philippines, the Chinese "People's Maritime Militia" has gone so far as to ram and sink a Vietnamese civilian fishing vessel, fishing in what were legally Vietnamese waters, and then accuse the Vietnamese crew of a crime for being there, in their own sea. (Bengali, Vo). Vietnam has not taken this lying down of course. They started with a diplomatic protest (Vu), which China, predictably enough, ignored, because no one's protests matter to China except China. So Vietnam escalated their response to the only language China understands: force (Tao).
Good for you, Vietnam.
So, in summary, China has run out of food at home and now they're prowling around the globe, stealing food from everyone else, then stealing territory and denying anyone else the right to fish in the territory they've stolen. Hmm... this pattern sounds familiar. Insinuating yourself into a new host, devouring all the resources, then leaving behind the ruined former host and moving on to a new one. What other creature on Earth does this?
Oh, that's right!
The Chinese are behaving just like a... well...
(1) There has never been a "Qinghai-Tibet Plateau." It's called the Tibetan Plateau, and the supposedly "Chinese" Province erroneously referred to herein by the name its Han occupiers gave it, "Qinghai," is actually the Tibetan province of Kham.
Works Cited
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