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.
https://www.andrewerickson.com/2016/03/chinas-maritime-milit...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://qz.com/1278321/an-image-from-space-reveals-the-fishi...
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.
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.
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).
UN like a League of Nations is rather a sad joke (well, apart from peace keeping missions).
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.
Which were responsible for the Haiti cholera outbreak as well as its cover-up. The UN is worse than useless.
Thankfully, most people don't. So it's a good thing the UN exists.
It's a forum of dialog, not a parliament to make laws.
[1] https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean/
Edited to include author name
Not entirely accurate. There's lots of blame to go around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Always thought I tasted a difference. This explains a lot.
