August 2, 2024 — On March 14, 2016, in the squid grounds off the coast of Patagonia, a rusty Chinese vessel named the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was fishing illegally, several miles inside Argentine waters. Spotted by an Argentine coast-guard patrol and ordered over the radio to halt, the specially-designed squid-fishing ship, known as a “jigger,” fled the scene. The Argentinians gave chase and fired warning shots. The Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 then tried to ram the coast-guard cutter, prompting it to open fire directly on the jigger, which soon sank.
Although the violent encounter at sea that day was unusual, the incursion into Argentine waters by a Chinese squid jigger was not. Owned by a state-run behemoth called the China National Fisheries Company, or CNFC, the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was one of several hundred Chinese jiggers that makes annual visits to the high-seas portion of the fishing grounds that lie beyond Argentina’s territory; many of these jiggers then turn off their locational transponders and cross secretly into Argentine waters. Since 2010, the Argentine navy has chased at least 11 Chinese squid vessels out of Argentine waters for suspected illegal fishing, according to the government.
In 2017, 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 the CNFC. (The CNFC did not respond to requests for comment.)
The move by local authorities may have been a contradiction, but it is an increasingly common one in Argentina—and elsewhere around the world. 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, a fleet that 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, then running incursions across the line into domestic waters. But in recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, 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 is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels.