We badly need some sort of industrial fish farming at a large scale. Oceanic fishing at this point is basically like hunting gathering at an industrial scale: we just catch whatever we can and who cares if it grows back, not our problem, "nature" will take care of it. The same way we seed, till, etc., we should be doing the same thing with oceans and "hunting" aka fishing should only be allowed as a hobby.
In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
> We badly need some sort of industrial fish farming at a large scale.
Even if we invented it, PRC would most likely not use it.
> In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
Unfortunately, this probably only happens when everything more exotic than common farm animals has been eaten to extinction.
I understand their desire to keep their newly achieved standards of living and I imagine they don't want to be dependent on foreign seas, especially as these situations can cause conflicts. They also have a pretty big EEZ, about 1 million sqkm. Seems more than enough to have some huge fish farms.
They're not irrational. They're quite rational. They'll go for whatever is cheapest.
For a long, long time, commercial fishing as they currently do it will be the cheapest way to do it. It's darn difficult to beat the cost-effectiveness of just harvesting the grown fish without any further involvement in the process. Especially given the labor conditions [1] exploited by these sorts of operations, there's no way that any domestically-operated farm could beat them out.
[1] I've been reading Ian Urbina's Outlaw Ocean on a recommendation from another comment somewhere on HN. It's eye-opening, to say the least.
> For a long, long time, commercial fishing as they currently do it will be the cheapest way to do it.
See, here is where I argue that's not the case. Commercial fishing has increased incredibly in the past 20 years or so. We don't have a "long, long time", unlike for oil, because we can't find new fish "reserves". We pretty much know where all the existing fish we'd like/want to eat is. I'd be surprised if fishing goes up at the current rate and we have fish to eat for more than 20 years, unless we switch to the sane thing: large scale, regulated and sustainable fish farming.
Now we're basically a few years before the Fishing "Dust Bowl".
Or, alternatively, we figuratively "boil the oceans" and persuade everyone who currently eats fish to not eat fish. I wish people trying this alternate approach good luck! :-)
Farmed fish are fed wild-caught fish generally, so their environmental impact is comparable. There is an ongoing effort to remove that from the chain, but it remains an unsolved problem.
Well, I have a feeling that the resolution of this problem will accelerate in the following decades. With China and other developing countries rising, we're going to need to feed 2-3 billion people more at developed country standards.
We'll literally suck all the fish out of the ocean at the rate we're going, with our current processes.
(Salt water) fish farming is still hunting on an industrial scale because the farmed fish are mostly carnivorous and are fed with feed derived to a large part from hunted fish. It's mostly a tool to strip the oceans even harder (with fish farms converting undesirable catch into species people like to eat, everything becomes a target)
They should farm the prey too then? I still wonder where those mice that pet snakes eat come from. Never had a pet snake so I don't know much about them.
Yeah, I agree. Otherwise it's like saying we can't grow corn because you need water, minerals and these days, fertilizers. When we really want to, we can take care of the whole chain.
If you continue that line of thought long enough you end up declaring the entirety of the world's oceans one big fish farm and truly sustainable fishing that doesn't deplete populations your method of farming.
The alternative is farming fish you can feed other things you can grow instead. Ultimately artificial meats and what have you will be the ultimate goal to sustain the whole system.
I don't understand why we eat carnivorous fish. It'd be like feeding on lions...
I read some of piketty's book, capital and idéologie, and he sources work that show that if India and China have historically had a greater population, it's because Europeans love meat. And feeding a population on meat requires much more agricultural space than feeding on veggies and cereals alone. I had always wondered why it was, and I liked this explanation!
Because in the open water of the oceans, not only the herbivorous level of the food chain is on the plankton scale but also the first carnivorous level or levels. The small fish that are eaten by the larger fish that we eat are already feeding off carnivores.
We also have a lot of issues getting salt water fish to reproduce in captivity, like only a couple universities have been able to get tuna to reproduce in captivity and not at scale.
What we need is to stop consuming animals and animal products, or we’ll keep having economy destroying pandemics. Not to mention the obvious problem that farming is horrendous for the animals. Animals aren’t some inanimate object.
We need to be realistic. Reeducating several billion people from something very addictive, culturally engrained and with no direct negative effects for consumers is almost impossible.
We have several documented(h1n1 etc) significant loss of life events due to animal agriculture.
No more silent downvoting. People are dying and will continue to die as these continue to happen until grown adults get some self discipline and stop eating meat.
I think the parent's point is well proven your exact example. There is a significant portion of the globe who think the pandemic isn't real or was caused by humans.
Remember when segregation was normal? Remember when slavery was normal? Remember when women had no rights? A growing and large amount of people believe abuse against animals and the environment follows on perfectly. You can be part of the change or blindly ignore it because it doesn't suit how you were brought up.
And we're not some magical creature free from biological needs.
Eating other animals is what got us here. Until we can print actual, chemically identical meat on a conveyor belt, our reliance on animals will continue.
> And we're not some magical creature free from biological needs.
Am I? I became 100% vegetarian a year ago. No one around me was vegetarian. I saved money. I never ate so well and I'm in my best physical form ever. What is magical?
You need supplements to grow healthily as a vegetarian. For example, it's difficult to get Omega 3, 6 and 9 from plants. You need supplements for that.
Also you've only been vegetarian a year. Being a vegetarian from birth to death without supplements would be much more difficult to do without major deficiencies.
Also vegetarians today have the option of buying food from all over the world, but that wasn't the case for the vast majority of human history.
You only need to look at cultures like in India, Taiwan and elsewhere that have large vegetarian population to see that your statement doesn’t hold water.
It's possible to have a large population with deficiencies, which may be the case in India for example [1].
Another factor is, the number of insects that accidentally get into the food supply provide some protein. I remember reading about how a more primitive lifestyle leads to more insects being in the food supply, which provides some of the necessary protein for humans to thrive. But I can't find the link at the moment.
Everyone needs Omega 3/6/9. You can get it from nuts and algae. IF you want to be inefficient and introduce a middleman, you can get it from fish.
B12 is needed by everyone. The meat you eat has it supplemented. Again, you can cut out the middleman and get it directly as a supplement rather than having a cow killed.
Practical experience of trying to go vegetarian/vegan. I gave up after a while. I just felt constantly hungry. Maybe because I started working out and going vegan at the same time.
fwiw - "vegetarian" doesn't count for animal well-being. Egg laying chickens and milk cows are treated really badly and their agony is rather prolonged for the duration of their "productive life".
India is incredibly agriculturally productive, with amounts of arable land other countries can only dream of. Try doing the same diet just a few paces up in more arid and mountainous Central Asia and it would be famine.
For most Asians and especially the Chinese, animals are just objects. Doesn't matter if you think about mammals skinned alive in some Chinese markets, turtles having their feet chopped off or Huskys locked into a 1-bedroom apartment for their entire life.
Asians mostly do not give a single damn about animal well-being. That's a uniquely Western thing.
Ah yes. The birthplace of several religions that that introduced the moral worthiness of animals centuries (if not longer) before the West and the origin of all mock meats up until a few decades ago has no interest in animal well-being. Absolutely.
Do any of the Woke/critical theory people know if it's acceptable to say something like this ^ if you explicitly tie it to culture? Is it OK to say some regional cultures place more emphasis on animal cruelty than others?
The thing is, most people saying this only pretend to give a damn because it reinforces the belief they already want to have that Asians are barbaric or undeveloped. It's just back-propogation of conclusions. So people are going to be raising eyebrows understandably if you bring this up randomly without knowing your facts.
You can talk about how and historically why some animals were or are eaten in some places in some countries - sure. But that kind of nuanced and historic analysis isn't usually why they're talking about this in the first place.
It's a uniquely western thing to pontificate about how enlightened we are about animal welfare while simultaneously funding the majority of the global meat industry - maybe.
While it's true some Asian countries eat animals "taboo" to eat in "the west", large parts of these industries comes from countries pulled out of the brink of famines just a few generations ago and many young people/adults in the developed parts of those countries have already moved away from consumption them or cruelty certain animals viewed as "companions".
Spare the preaching about us caring about other animals though. I don't see why eating, say, a horse is any more ghoulish than eating a pig.
A lot of those animals that became taboo to eat in the West was due to industrialization making pork, beef, and poultry cheaper than other meats and driving them out of the market, and cultural attitudes following afterwards to make them taboo. The "west" ate plenty of strange meats at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Hot dogs sausages often had dog meat in them while they were native to Germany, and you could still find horse and dog meat sold in the early 1900s.
Go to most farms or slaughterhouses in the West and you will see that Westerners don't give a damn about animals either. The only difference is that we are hiding the cruelty so we can feel good about ourselves.
I'm thinking fish farming in urban centers, maybe tied to hyrdoponic greenhouses.
I can picture more urban parks, with many fish ponds. The fish pond water used to grow labour intensive cash crops like raspberries (that are hard to pick).
Salmon is general is a bad fish to farm because it consumes more protein than it produces. There are better fish (in terms of sustainability) that can be famred, and proper regulations (which the US has, compared to other countries) exist to help. In general, I don't believe the US is the problem with overfishing or polution problems caused by fish farming, compared to other countries who don't have or want the ability to keep things in check.
Dunno. Maybe less efficient use of the same feedstock?
Further, now they're putting oil in Salmon feedstock so they have imaginary dietary advantages i.e. Omega-3 fatty acid, which farm-raised salmon don't have much of normally.
It might make sense, especially for where salmon farms are usually placed, or it might be overly destructive in terms of resources and environment. The analysis needs to be done before we can make a conclusion about it, but I'm sure other parties have already come to the conclusion they want.
Ya. I’m not sure why you are being downvoted but with animals you always get out less than you put in. Plants are the same way, but can grab other inputs (solar, minerals from the ground).
Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
> Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
Ideally, yes. In practice, we feed animals mostly things that we ourselves could eat ourselves - like corn, soy, and grains. Sure, you can find cute examples of cattle eating grass on rocky soil... but around 99% of animals are not grown that way... they are grown in factory farms where they're fed soy, corn, and grains.
Soy isn't very appetizing to humans in large quantities, so if it wasn't for animal feed, we wouldn't' grow nearly as much as it. Likewise for corn, which is a not so great staple for humans, and often just used as a sugar substitute. Yes, we can live on animal feed, but we can't really thrive on it, and a lot of land is only suited to such.
Meat is still a useful medium for converting what humans can't consume very well to something they can. Especially pigs, which in much of the world are used as recyclers (not in the west anymore, due to safety issues, and probably not for long in the undeveloped world, but they have bigger problems to worry about).
The more these discussions progress, the more I wonder if there is really only one solution. We need less people. Trying to convince 8 billion people to do something like never eat meat or fish seems like an impossible goal. We need to raise the standard of living in countries that reproduction rates > 2. We could also remove tax breaks for kids after the second in developed countries to mitigate the incentives for extra children. Maybe if we only had 4 billion people, we might be able to have everything be sustainable. Such a hard problem to solve.
It's probably not sustainable. If everyone start consuming at the same rate as an average person from a developed country, world would run out of resources in no time.
The thing is, fertility rates are going down across the world.
What are you going to do with the current people? They will all want a decent quality of life. Will you sacrifice your life and quality of life to achieve this greater goal you mention? Or do you just want "others" to sacrifice themselves for it?
Overpopulation is a racist myth. Developed countries use far more resources and waste significantly more food than developing nations and wealthy people have a larger footprint than their working class counterparts.
I'm not sure why you are claiming racism. I'm suggesting we raise the standard of living in poorer countries. That we empower women in these countries. Honestly, how is that racist?
Also, yes, wealthy countries over consume. Collectively we just don't care. We can't even get people to wear a mask. I don't think there is a pragmatic way to convince the west to consume less.
They're doing that. Bring up an areal view of china's coast, zoom in on most any protected bay and you can see they have some kind of aquatic farming going on at a pretty impressive scale.
>> We badly need some sort of industrial fish farming at a large scale.
> They're doing that.
IIRC, most farmed fish are fed with fish meal, which is basically less-desirable wild-caught fish, so fish farming does not take the pressure off the oceans as much as you'd think.
> The production and large-scale use of fishmeal are controversial. The lucrative market for fishmeal as a feed encourages corporate fisheries not to limit their yields of by-catch (from which fish meal is made), and thus leads to depletion of ecosystems, environmental damage, and the collapse of local fisheries.
> Farming carnivorous fish, such as salmon, does not always reduce pressure on wild fisheries. Carnivorous farmed fish are usually fed fishmeal and fish oil extracted from wild forage fish.
It's a good example of the Tragedy of the Commons. We mostly solved that problem on land, and even ended up with industrial farming by allowing people to own pieces of land to run their own farming operations.
Would be nice to be able to replace off-shore oil rigs with off-shore fishing farms that sell the produce directly to retail markets. Might even be able to run aquatic "farm to table" restaurants!
> Would be nice to be able to replace off-shore oil rigs with off-shore fishing farms that sell the produce directly to retail markets. Might even be able to run aquatic "farm to table" restaurants!
There's definitely at least an order magnitude more offshore aquaculture farms than there are oil-rigs currently.
> It's a good example of the Tragedy of the Commons. We mostly solved that problem on land, and even ended up with industrial farming by allowing people to own pieces of land to run their own farming operations.
That's a myth. This "problem" wasn't much of a problem, historically, since real-world communities would spontaneously develop regulatory practices to prevent over-exploitation of the commons:
> Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-gov...)
What we need is to reduce the popularity of consuming "predator" fish species -- there is an abundant supply of forage fish, but these are often caught and fed to farmed fish! Sardines and herring aren't popular today, but they'd be a lot more appetizing and sustainable if we just froze them on the boat instead of grinding them into fishmeal to be fed to tilapia or salmon. See:
They are overfished largely in order to be fed to other animals. Similarly we clear too much land to farm corn but we do it because it gets fed to animals. But nobody would refer to this to argue against eating corn.
I don't know how to quantify the potential sustainable yield of forage fish vs. the human diet, but I know that eating small fish is more sustainable than feeding them to larger fish and eating those.
Maybe something like this[0] will become more common. Seems to have had some success in increasing the Salmon population (via plankton boom) but was obviously quite controversial.
What are they doing with all that squid? If the market price of the squid doesn't cover the cost of extraction, then that must mean there isn't much demand for the product.
I dont think China counts as a centrally planned economy. Its a weird state-capitalism hybrid. The government has a say in corporate affairs but doesn’t set production goals.
Great, meat SHOULD cost a fortune. The actual cost of meat is not what you pay for it, the only reason it’s even affordable is because the taxpayer shoulders the burden of the farm subsidies. Cut those out and a $5 Big Mac would cost almost $15.
Add to that the environmental impact, insane water usage, and the fact that meat production will continue to destroy economies through pandemics, and it should cost 10-15x more than it does now.
You don’t need taxes to offset subsidies, of course. You just need to end the subsidies. But yeah, there are likely major environmental externalities that could be eliminated by taxation.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but this doesn't seem like it could be true. My Dad always raised cattle as a pastime, just a handful, one for meat and sold the rest. Never subsidized, and he usually broke just about even. A big mac has a fifth pound of beef. $75 a pound for ground beef? He'd buy hundreds. So would I, and everyone else. Why bother cutting out steaks, just grind the whole thing down.
Agricultural subsidies that affect beef, either directly or indirectly, have been in place in the US for almost a century. So either your father is quite old, did not live in the US, or that meat was subsidized.
OK, but I'm asking for -how-, truly. My father is getting up there, but still raises cattle to this day. He buys them as calves, and sells them the next year. They mainly eat grass and hay, but admittedly there is -some- corn feed in the winter, which I understand as one source of subsidy, but I can't see it amounting to much in the grand scheme just based on the amount. When selling them, after accounting for initial cost, medicine, and extras, he breaks even. And that's at today's 'cheap' beef prices.
Industrial Carrie farming has additional costs. Like wise they need to be transported, butchered, packaged, etc. This adds cost.... Your dad's break even is still losing money for anyone doing this as a business.
Most people in society like meat so it makes sense we subsidize it. This is progressive. Otherwise only the wealthy could eat meat. The wealthy actually pay more to eat meat as they pay the majority of the taxes that go into these subsidies so nearly everyone can afford meat in the market. Once again, this is progressive.
Just like roads. Most people in society want to be able to freely travel where they want and when they want to. So we subsidize roads as a society where the wealthy pay more in terms of taxes but everyone gets to use the roads.
If true then hopefully people agree to mandate that we value these negative externalities more than subsidized farming. Anything is possible if people can persuade others it's worth doing and that the trade offs are worthwhile.
It's a representative democracy. People vote for representatives that then propose bills and spending policy and vote on them. Elect officials or run for office yourself if you think your ideas are better and more attractive.
Who should be the authority for what society finds value in, which policies are invoked, how taxes are distributed and spent if not the representatives of the people? Clerics? Doctors? Lawyers? Scientists? Sociologists? Bartenders?
People could afford to eat beef (albeit less of it) at 1800s levels of wealth per capita.
Currently high quality beef imitations like B-On are not quite cost competitive with real ground beef. Basically it's taken us an additional ~100yr of supply chain growth to get to a technological point where plant beef is priced like beef was 100yr ago.
I feel very comfortable saying that any change that hits the low level commodities that underpin these things, fuel, grain, etc. would just exacerbate that difference and set plant based "transition foods" back.
Neither can (1) enforceable maritime laws and (2) a united and effective approach to dealing with the flagrant abuse of intellectual/legal/environmental policy from/by the country.
“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.
Several paragraphs later:
“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“
Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
The "by" in "by 2021" implies the restriction is currently in breach. This may be a matter of translation differences, but I doubt it. It's more likely that the lying left hand doesn't have its story straight with the lying right hand of the CCP propaganda units.
It can be difficult to orchestrate years and layers of adjusted statistics to tell a consistent story.
Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.
same reason you would lie about the total amount of vessels in the first place.
here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.
I think people ascribe motive to a lot of Chinese behavior, where it's probably more an issue of perspective.
In China, as near as I can tell, 2-3 generations have been raised with the understanding that truth is always subordinate to the goals of the CCP. In fact, if not in abstract.
That's one thing, internal to a country. That's very different when you're talking international diplomacy.
And yet it seems like China follows this exact playbook in that arena too.
It has to make for some awkward conversations when a diplomat is swearing (and believing, inasmuch as doublethink is possible) that the fleet numbers X, when another country is providing literal evidence that it's 5X.
>Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
That's the thing about lies.
At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.
The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.
I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.
Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.
Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?
The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.
Sorry there are a lot of emotions in your comment but very little substance.
>Eh, my observation is about a recurring behavior from China
Can you clarify which behaviour you are referring to? It's been pointed out that the Chinese goal was to stabilize their fishing fleet size to around 3000, which given their normal growth focused policies seemed like some thing worthy of planning. And not propaganda as the parent comment was implying
According to the 13th Five-Year Plan for the National Fishing Industry http://www.moa.gov.cn/nybgb/2017/derq/201712/t20171227_61312... China had 65398 sea-going fishing boats with a length of at least 12 meters in 2015 and planned to reduce that number to 57095 in 2020. The number of distant-water fishing vessels is given as 2512 in 2015, but I can't find anything to substantiate the claim that it's supposed to be limited to at most 3000 by 2021 (though I didn't read the whole plan, so maybe I missed it). EDIT: Turns out I should have looked at the five-year plan for distant-water fishing specifically, which does say that the number of vessels should be stabilized below 3000 by 2020 and also mentions that at the end of 2016, there were close to 2900 either already deployed or under construction http://www.moa.gov.cn/gk/ghjh_1/201712/t20171227_6128624.htm
Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.
I have no horse in this race, and may even be persuaded to agree with you, but as other commenters pointed out, the statements in themselves are not logically inconsistent.
The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.
Most likely they're interpreting vessels operating in disputed 9dash eez as DWF instead of domestic fleet. So they magically discovered 12,490 new ships not claimed by China, which would not consider them DWF vessels. See table on page 15 of report.
> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.
AND
>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018
CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.
Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.
As with all numbers coming out of the CCP - a healthy dose of skepticism is required. Just like with the Soviet Union's Politburo - all stats and numbers are curated to fit the public face the CCP wishes to present for global consumption.
A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.
Your previous comment that said this is flagged and dead. It's not good practice to repost it, even if you add a bit of text that is still not fact based.
> even if you add a bit of text that is still not fact based
It seems shilling for the CCP is easy to do when you refuse to recognize the credibility problem of CCP data sources.
We've seen these types on HN before. The ones who's accounts are 90% filled with Pro CCP comments - clearly shilling for the CCP. Ones like yours, La1n.
CCP lies about the number of COVID-19 deaths - lies about how it spread - lies about GDP growth, lies about militarization of manmade islands in international waters, lies about ongoing religious persecutions, Uighurs and more, etc. The list is endless.
But, they want us to believe their numbers about fishing boats? Doesn't matter how this article came to their numbers independently - the CCP Official Numbers are the only numbers to be trusted?
You can't attack other users like this on HN. The poison of imaginary accusations of astroturfing/shilling (and believe me, they are almost all imaginary—I've looked at this data closely and it's impossible to come to any other conclusion) does vastly more damage to this site than the phenomena you're complaining about. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again. This was a particularly bad case.
I've written a great deal about this if you want some explanation about why we moderate HN this way (no, it's not because we're secret Communists):
Don't forget behind China, you got India, SEA, the rest of Africa which will experience a population boom this century. How we going to feed all these people when their living standards go up? We need to get to mars fast.
We need less people in the world. Our only hope to avoid mass human suffering is that as more women get educated and independent they reduce the number of children they’ll conceive to 1 or 2.
Personally, I think people are an asset, not a burden, and the greatest things in the world! That's right, I mean you, dear reader. Straighten that back!
Something doesn't ads up. If we are 50 couples, and we all have 2 kids, when the original parents die we are still 100 people. If 50 couples have 1 kid, wen the original parents die, you have half of the population. If they did that for some many years, how come they kept growing?
* The couple has just one child, who is handicapped or unable to work because of non-hereditary diseases.
* Both parents are only children themselves, and have just one child so far.
* The couple adopted their first child because one of them was diagnosed as infertile.
* The couple remarried but have only one child in total.
* The couple are ethnic minorities who moved to the city from provinces bordering other countries and were given permission from a high-ranking Family Planning office before they moved.
* The husband has brothers, but only one brother is able to give birth, and the others have promised not to adopt.
* The husband is a farmer who married a woman already with a daughter (this only if that husband pledges to care for the woman’s parents).
* The couple are rural farmers, in which one spouse is a handicapped soldier with an injury grade B or above or can no longer work.
* The couple are farmers from the deep mountains who only have a daughter, depend on farming and are poor.
* Another exception to the one child policy allowed families in rural areas to have another child if the first child was a girl, in hopes to have a boy as their second child.
It caused harn because it was stupidly implemented not because it's generally bad.
But btw. many western countries have a shrinking population since years to a degree where that's an problem.
But this also means that the countries which have to take (reasonable) actions include many contribute which often can't afford more reasonable actions :/
There's no population bomb. Let's please lay Malthus to rest already. According to some projections, world population will peak sometime in the 2040s and then start to decline.
But one reasons why the projection is that way is because countries do nudge people to not having explosive growth by all kind of measures.
Some as simple as reducing poverty.
Some by making it most viable to have one or two children.
Some (China) by limiting the number of children to roughly two.
...
Not all of this policies are good, not all are intentionally made to have that effect.
Still if you want to shrink a countries populations there are much more ways then a hard limit to the number of children (Which I think will hardly ever play out well.).
But there are a fiew things you should definitely do:
- Make sure not gender is valued above the other gender.
- No 1 child limit (instead of 2), with a 1 child limit we would have two people having one child, i.e. halving. Which is probably faster shrinking then any country can properly handle (i.e. after a while a horrible ratio of young to old people etc.). A two child limit still will cause shrinkage.
- Don't fixate the law on women, it's unreasonable and put's a further burden on them.
- Make sure your social system isn't incompatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure society is compatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure it's not turned into a money making machine.
- Consider regional differences.
Which would be a view points you should keep to which china didn't bother with at all.
Most problems of the past one child policy in china come from:
- Man being valued much more then woman now leading to there being much more of them then woman.
- To fast shrinkage puts the social system in danger as to view young people have to care for to many old people.
- The laws being abusive to woman.
- The laws unreasonable handling of children which under the law should not have been born but have been born anyway.
EDIT: Just to be clear, there are many more ways to (slowly) shrink a countries population which are based on subtle nudging society in the intended direction instead of enforcing any hard limit on the number of children. Which is probably what China should have done, tbh.
There is so much room left to consume less or in a more sustainable way. We can produce more than enough food for everyone and drastically cut down on meat consumption and stop fishing from the ocean. That would make a huge difference for sustainability and carbon footprint.
However, non of this will happen. We are still in a world where countries fight over getting more resources to consume. That needs to shift to fighting to protect resources. We need sanctions on countries that fish too much and have too high emissions. Otherwise we will be caught in the tragedy of the commons till the planet is uninhabitable.
Meanwhile we cannot even properly coordinate a response to a pandemic.
This is not correct. The world can currently sustain all 8 billion people and then some. It simply chooses not to. Population control is a very weird argument and I'd like to not hear it anymore, as someone who used to believe it.
As long as Chinese government exists, there will be no world peace and no sustainable approach to anything. The few people in power in the Chinese government will always incite their masses and cause destruction by pitting us vs them.
There are many reasons why China catches heat for this.
China is big so when it does things like this it tends to have a larger impact than other countries' practices. Also it has been growing very fast, and we tend to notice things that are changing. China's assertiveness on the world stage also causes anxiety which has a halo effect on China's other actions/policies.
No, what's "odd" is the tu quoque style arguments that come up any time even the mildest criticism of China comes up. As if any other country being bad excuses China's bad behavior, or is reason to not point out China's bad behavior.
China asserts its power to the detriment of neighboring countries in almost every aspect of life.
Their disregard for others and for the environment is staggering and on a staggering scale.
There are very few countries who can even come close to that - probably only the US qualifies. Even then, China has twice the CO2 emissions than the US, more than three times the emissions of the entire EU, and more than a magnitude more CO2 emissions than coal dependent countries like Germany. Furthermore, China's CO2 emissions are also higher than any other country in history.
China fishes illegally and under false flags all over the world, using a government sponsored fishing fleet.
This is all because the CCP needs to ensure progress in welfare which would be threatened by shortages in meat or fish. Otherwise, the Chinese citizens would perhaps not continue to accept the repressive regime.
But do we smaller countries accept these transgressions? Fishing the territorial waters of smaller states empty should be considered an act of war - which it would be if it weren't for China's relative power distance compared to local neighbors.
All of this is frankly unacceptable and needs to be called out. Small countries need to band together and present China with a strong opposition. This should and can not depend on the US. We need to learn from history. The increasing imperialism by the CCP should be a warning!
Are you in all honesty trying to argue that it would be fair and just if a Chinese person was only allowed to emit one tenth of that of a German person?
I expect the per-capita gap to shrink further in the next few years. China's much higher absolute emissions are largely a function of its much larger population.
> incite their masses and cause destruction by pitting us vs them.
So unlike Trumps white house. Given the timing of release of report I wouldn't put it beyond election FUD operations under the guise of some credible report.
Overfishing aside I believe cephalopods (such as squid) are expected to thrive relative to other marine creatures - they seem to be well poised to adapt in response to rising ocean acidification/CO2 and decreasing fish stocks
Humanity isn't the problem, just the number of humans. Historically we had wars and famines and disease to take care of that. Neo-COVID will reduce those numbers.
Is the world just going to have to let China own itself to learn the hard way?
Like, it just seems like a bad news generator and we constantly need to dance around the CCP trying to guide them appropriately with sanctions, and threats and incentives.
I understand depleting the oceans would be catastrophic, but how is this regime ever going to learn? Honest question?
This question has been answered many times in the past. Through most of human history, it would have involved killing 80% of their young men and taking the women as slaves. I don't know where it will lead in the age of nuclear weapons.
Well someone has to choose what bad news to highlight and how biased to highlight said news. For example, per capita, Taiwan and S.Korea have larger DWF fleets, Taiwan significantly so. Factor in EEZ and you get a good idea of why.
I read the actual study. It counts any vessel that crossed out of Chinese EEZ during the year to be DWF which is a stupid metric. Further Chinese EEZ was undefined which is a gross oversight. Does the count include vessels operating in SCS within China's 9dash bounds? Obviously China wouldn't categorize vessels in her "domestic" waters are DWF. This distinction is as least worth a mentioning but the paper glosses over it entirely. It's typical lazy reporting based on poor research.
Disappointed in the article. When I saw the Yale domain I thought it would be a research paper or at least something written by an expert on the subject. It appears this is written by a journalist[0] and as typical of things written hy journalists, leaves out crucial details/sources which leaves you with more questions.
> the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions.
???? The article doesn't go any further, but how would you use a bunch of unarmed fishing vessels crewed by "illiterates" (according to the article) for anything resembling a military purpose. Later on it mentions "crowding" but doesn't really go into detail about what that means.
Plus what is a "distant water fishing fleet"? The article gives numbers for overall number of fishing vessels and then "distant water fishing fleet", but only provides context for the later number by saying the US has only 300 such boats in its fleet. If a country with coasts on two oceans only has 300 of these, it has to be some really specific category of boat right? What makes this category important?
And of course there's the framing of the article, the fishing is done by private commercial fishers but apparently their entire country is to blame. I mean you can make some arguments about subsidies but then the article itself acknowledges that other countries also engage in similar level of subsidies.
Also there's this weird fixation on North Korea, where it claims the Chinese fishing fleet is depleting North Korean waters, but doesn't really tell us about whether or not that's done with North Korea's permission. It mentions that it would be technically illegal for NK to sell fishing rights, but that doesn't really bear any significance.
> As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment...
As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries. These sentiments seem to align with the values promoted by the Yale School of the Environment [1]. The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
> As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries.
He might have an expert level knowledge on the topic, but he is using all the standard tricks journalists use to paint a narrative. Bringing up statistics without context and without defining the thing it's measuring, using technical terminology without explaining what it means, alluding to certain things without elaborating, and citing sources(if at all) in a way such that you have to spend a lot of time hunting down an actual document supporting his claims.
> The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
evidence of what? I'm not denying that Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea. It still seems weird that in a situation where Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea's waters, the fixation is on sanctions. I can understand this being bad if North Korea doesn't want Chinese boats fishing in their waters but both articles seem to imply that there is implicit approval, in which case who cares? Sanctions are antithetical to free trade and human welfare.
Being completely ignorant of the fishing industry, these numbers of vessels seem crazy high. I had no idea.
Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry? Are there 100,000 distant-water vessels active in the world? Or only 25,000 total?
If the Chinese represent 20% of the world industry, but are trying to feed 18% of the world's population, that doesn't seem outrageous. But if they represent 50% of the world industry, then my eyebrows go up.
At the same time, if the US represents 10% of the industry and 4% of world population, or if UK represents 3% of the industry but <1% of world population, doesn't that make it a bit hard to swallow?
Almost all of the numbers above are made up. I don't know what they really are. That's my point. I'm reluctant to grab my pitchfork with my current level of ignorance.
> Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry
For comparison, the 2nd/3rd/4th largest distant-water fleets are Taiwan at around 400 and Japan and S. Korea at around 150-200 [0]. Probably the entire rest of the world accounts for less than 10% of foreign fishing.
Are there plans for an international fishing and plastic disposal sanctions? Citizens can justly complain a faraway country is turning their fish rarer and more poisnous.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadIn a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
Even if we invented it, PRC would most likely not use it.
> In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
Unfortunately, this probably only happens when everything more exotic than common farm animals has been eaten to extinction.
I understand their desire to keep their newly achieved standards of living and I imagine they don't want to be dependent on foreign seas, especially as these situations can cause conflicts. They also have a pretty big EEZ, about 1 million sqkm. Seems more than enough to have some huge fish farms.
For a long, long time, commercial fishing as they currently do it will be the cheapest way to do it. It's darn difficult to beat the cost-effectiveness of just harvesting the grown fish without any further involvement in the process. Especially given the labor conditions [1] exploited by these sorts of operations, there's no way that any domestically-operated farm could beat them out.
[1] I've been reading Ian Urbina's Outlaw Ocean on a recommendation from another comment somewhere on HN. It's eye-opening, to say the least.
See, here is where I argue that's not the case. Commercial fishing has increased incredibly in the past 20 years or so. We don't have a "long, long time", unlike for oil, because we can't find new fish "reserves". We pretty much know where all the existing fish we'd like/want to eat is. I'd be surprised if fishing goes up at the current rate and we have fish to eat for more than 20 years, unless we switch to the sane thing: large scale, regulated and sustainable fish farming.
Now we're basically a few years before the Fishing "Dust Bowl".
Or, alternatively, we figuratively "boil the oceans" and persuade everyone who currently eats fish to not eat fish. I wish people trying this alternate approach good luck! :-)
Something like 2/3 of the world's industrial fish farming happens in China.
It may also be helped by the fact that Chinese eat quite a lot of fresh water fish compared to what we eat in Western countries.
Of course an issue is that it creates further pressure on agriculture/traditional fishing to produce fish feed...
We'll literally suck all the fish out of the ocean at the rate we're going, with our current processes.
I read some of piketty's book, capital and idéologie, and he sources work that show that if India and China have historically had a greater population, it's because Europeans love meat. And feeding a population on meat requires much more agricultural space than feeding on veggies and cereals alone. I had always wondered why it was, and I liked this explanation!
We have several documented(h1n1 etc) significant loss of life events due to animal agriculture.
No more silent downvoting. People are dying and will continue to die as these continue to happen until grown adults get some self discipline and stop eating meat.
Eating other animals is what got us here. Until we can print actual, chemically identical meat on a conveyor belt, our reliance on animals will continue.
Am I? I became 100% vegetarian a year ago. No one around me was vegetarian. I saved money. I never ate so well and I'm in my best physical form ever. What is magical?
Also you've only been vegetarian a year. Being a vegetarian from birth to death without supplements would be much more difficult to do without major deficiencies.
Also vegetarians today have the option of buying food from all over the world, but that wasn't the case for the vast majority of human history.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890
https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/malnutr...
Guess where do you get folic acid, b12, etc from?
As a side note, OTC supplements are not as effective. You need prescription supplements if anyone is considering going vegetarian.
Another factor is, the number of insects that accidentally get into the food supply provide some protein. I remember reading about how a more primitive lifestyle leads to more insects being in the food supply, which provides some of the necessary protein for humans to thrive. But I can't find the link at the moment.
1: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/80-india...
I'm all for lab produced everything, but it's not good enough yet for me to feel comfortable trying to outsmart nature.
Everyone needs Omega 3/6/9. You can get it from nuts and algae. IF you want to be inefficient and introduce a middleman, you can get it from fish.
B12 is needed by everyone. The meat you eat has it supplemented. Again, you can cut out the middleman and get it directly as a supplement rather than having a cow killed.
Beef is ~1800lbs.
Not particularly efficient is it
fwiw - "vegetarian" doesn't count for animal well-being. Egg laying chickens and milk cows are treated really badly and their agony is rather prolonged for the duration of their "productive life".
[1] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a-na...
Asians mostly do not give a single damn about animal well-being. That's a uniquely Western thing.
Videos have come out, a few wrists get slapped, and the abuse continues. The western masses continuing to consume their product is tacit approval.
This isn’t a western vs eastern thing. It’s a human thing.
(also, does "Asian" include India and the Jain, for example?)
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1907/06/23/106...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag%C3%B9#:~:text=horse https://stefangourmet.com/2013/02/23/there-is-nothing-wrong-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_meat#Italy
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That counts for all animals, no?
Further, now they're putting oil in Salmon feedstock so they have imaginary dietary advantages i.e. Omega-3 fatty acid, which farm-raised salmon don't have much of normally.
So add that cost to raising salmon.
Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
Ideally, yes. In practice, we feed animals mostly things that we ourselves could eat ourselves - like corn, soy, and grains. Sure, you can find cute examples of cattle eating grass on rocky soil... but around 99% of animals are not grown that way... they are grown in factory farms where they're fed soy, corn, and grains.
Meat is still a useful medium for converting what humans can't consume very well to something they can. Especially pigs, which in much of the world are used as recyclers (not in the west anymore, due to safety issues, and probably not for long in the undeveloped world, but they have bigger problems to worry about).
The undeveloped world or the pigs?
What are you going to do with the current people? They will all want a decent quality of life. Will you sacrifice your life and quality of life to achieve this greater goal you mention? Or do you just want "others" to sacrifice themselves for it?
https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-thes...
https://theconversation.com/emissions-inequality-there-is-a-...
Also, yes, wealthy countries over consume. Collectively we just don't care. We can't even get people to wear a mask. I don't think there is a pragmatic way to convince the west to consume less.
Understandably, it's much harder to ask people to reduce their current way of life.
But technology still is the key here.
US household energy consumption actually dropped, resulting into overall leveled national consumption total [1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php
They're doing that. Bring up an areal view of china's coast, zoom in on most any protected bay and you can see they have some kind of aquatic farming going on at a pretty impressive scale.
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.8785992,117.6354366,322m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.6576045,117.4483416,171m/dat...
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=d1e87c14-b29f-4173-a4f5-cbd56...
> They're doing that.
IIRC, most farmed fish are fed with fish meal, which is basically less-desirable wild-caught fish, so fish farming does not take the pressure off the oceans as much as you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_meal
> The production and large-scale use of fishmeal are controversial. The lucrative market for fishmeal as a feed encourages corporate fisheries not to limit their yields of by-catch (from which fish meal is made), and thus leads to depletion of ecosystems, environmental damage, and the collapse of local fisheries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_farming
> Farming carnivorous fish, such as salmon, does not always reduce pressure on wild fisheries. Carnivorous farmed fish are usually fed fishmeal and fish oil extracted from wild forage fish.
Would be nice to be able to replace off-shore oil rigs with off-shore fishing farms that sell the produce directly to retail markets. Might even be able to run aquatic "farm to table" restaurants!
There's definitely at least an order magnitude more offshore aquaculture farms than there are oil-rigs currently.
That's a myth. This "problem" wasn't much of a problem, historically, since real-world communities would spontaneously develop regulatory practices to prevent over-exploitation of the commons:
> Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-gov...)
Privatization is one solution, but it seems to often be falsely portrayed as the only solution. The wiki article has a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Solutio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture#/media/File:Global...
What we need is to reduce the popularity of consuming "predator" fish species -- there is an abundant supply of forage fish, but these are often caught and fed to farmed fish! Sardines and herring aren't popular today, but they'd be a lot more appetizing and sustainable if we just froze them on the boat instead of grinding them into fishmeal to be fed to tilapia or salmon. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forage_fish
I don't know how to quantify the potential sustainable yield of forage fish vs. the human diet, but I know that eating small fish is more sustainable than feeding them to larger fish and eating those.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean...
So they probably think net they are profiting from this. But then, centrally planned economies are not efficient at decision-making...
Add to that the environmental impact, insane water usage, and the fact that meat production will continue to destroy economies through pandemics, and it should cost 10-15x more than it does now.
So I'm curious where that number comes from.
Just like roads. Most people in society want to be able to freely travel where they want and when they want to. So we subsidize roads as a society where the wealthy pay more in terms of taxes but everyone gets to use the roads.
So, we should subsidize things that people like? Should we subsidize sugar?
Most Americans are eating far more meat than doctors recommend.
Who should be the authority for what society finds value in, which policies are invoked, how taxes are distributed and spent if not the representatives of the people? Clerics? Doctors? Lawyers? Scientists? Sociologists? Bartenders?
Currently high quality beef imitations like B-On are not quite cost competitive with real ground beef. Basically it's taken us an additional ~100yr of supply chain growth to get to a technological point where plant beef is priced like beef was 100yr ago.
I feel very comfortable saying that any change that hits the low level commodities that underpin these things, fuel, grain, etc. would just exacerbate that difference and set plant based "transition foods" back.
In a healthy democracy, government's enforcement is mostly a force for good.
“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.
Several paragraphs later:
“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“
Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
If you're that itchy for a quarrel, just have at it.
Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.
here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariellasimke/2020/08/09/over-20...
it's not "inconsistent propaganda" it's under-reporting and outright lying, which is par for the course when it comes to the CCP.
In China, as near as I can tell, 2-3 generations have been raised with the understanding that truth is always subordinate to the goals of the CCP. In fact, if not in abstract.
That's one thing, internal to a country. That's very different when you're talking international diplomacy.
And yet it seems like China follows this exact playbook in that arena too.
It has to make for some awkward conversations when a diplomat is swearing (and believing, inasmuch as doublethink is possible) that the fleet numbers X, when another country is providing literal evidence that it's 5X.
Furthermore, it says restrict to under 3000, while you have changed it to reduce.
http://jiuban.moa.gov.cn/zwllm/ghjh/201712/t20171221_5985078...
Also for more details about the ODI estimate: https://www.cffacape.org/publications-blog/how-large-is-the-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-shanghai-population...
According to your logic, they are lying about the population size of Shanghai as well? LOL
That's the thing about lies.
At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.
The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.
I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.
Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.
Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?
The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.
Could it be an inaccurate translation? Yes.
Is China abusing their fishing fleets and actively try to dismiss that? Yes.
Is China actively implicated in lies and deception, and are observed doing it? Yes.
>Eh, my observation is about a recurring behavior from China
Can you clarify which behaviour you are referring to? It's been pointed out that the Chinese goal was to stabilize their fishing fleet size to around 3000, which given their normal growth focused policies seemed like some thing worthy of planning. And not propaganda as the parent comment was implying
Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.
The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.
> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.
AND
>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018
CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.
Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-document...
[1] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.
It seems shilling for the CCP is easy to do when you refuse to recognize the credibility problem of CCP data sources.
We've seen these types on HN before. The ones who's accounts are 90% filled with Pro CCP comments - clearly shilling for the CCP. Ones like yours, La1n.
CCP lies about the number of COVID-19 deaths - lies about how it spread - lies about GDP growth, lies about militarization of manmade islands in international waters, lies about ongoing religious persecutions, Uighurs and more, etc. The list is endless.
But, they want us to believe their numbers about fishing boats? Doesn't matter how this article came to their numbers independently - the CCP Official Numbers are the only numbers to be trusted?
I've written a great deal about this if you want some explanation about why we moderate HN this way (no, it's not because we're secret Communists):
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926128
The major problem is skewed consumption and wastage due to structural poverty. That should be our focus, rather than expanding to another planet.
This is already the case in most of the world, including many developing countries.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120114/under...
Personally, I think people are an asset, not a burden, and the greatest things in the world! That's right, I mean you, dear reader. Straighten that back!
* The couple has just one child, who is handicapped or unable to work because of non-hereditary diseases. * Both parents are only children themselves, and have just one child so far.
* The couple adopted their first child because one of them was diagnosed as infertile.
* The couple remarried but have only one child in total.
* The couple are ethnic minorities who moved to the city from provinces bordering other countries and were given permission from a high-ranking Family Planning office before they moved.
* The husband has brothers, but only one brother is able to give birth, and the others have promised not to adopt.
* The husband is a farmer who married a woman already with a daughter (this only if that husband pledges to care for the woman’s parents).
* The couple are rural farmers, in which one spouse is a handicapped soldier with an injury grade B or above or can no longer work.
* The couple are farmers from the deep mountains who only have a daughter, depend on farming and are poor.
* Another exception to the one child policy allowed families in rural areas to have another child if the first child was a girl, in hopes to have a boy as their second child.
[0] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c5d870b...
But btw. many western countries have a shrinking population since years to a degree where that's an problem.
But this also means that the countries which have to take (reasonable) actions include many contribute which often can't afford more reasonable actions :/
Some as simple as reducing poverty.
Some by making it most viable to have one or two children.
Some (China) by limiting the number of children to roughly two.
...
Not all of this policies are good, not all are intentionally made to have that effect.
Still if you want to shrink a countries populations there are much more ways then a hard limit to the number of children (Which I think will hardly ever play out well.).
Then temporarily unsterilizing by winning the lottery, points, ability score, merit, money, whatever...
Simple, innit?
Any law which is not doing so and just enact it the same for any larger region (the world, or just whole of china) is bound to fail big time.
But there are a fiew things you should definitely do:
- Make sure not gender is valued above the other gender.
- No 1 child limit (instead of 2), with a 1 child limit we would have two people having one child, i.e. halving. Which is probably faster shrinking then any country can properly handle (i.e. after a while a horrible ratio of young to old people etc.). A two child limit still will cause shrinkage.
- Don't fixate the law on women, it's unreasonable and put's a further burden on them.
- Make sure your social system isn't incompatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure society is compatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure it's not turned into a money making machine.
- Consider regional differences.
Which would be a view points you should keep to which china didn't bother with at all.
Most problems of the past one child policy in china come from:
- Man being valued much more then woman now leading to there being much more of them then woman.
- To fast shrinkage puts the social system in danger as to view young people have to care for to many old people.
- The laws being abusive to woman.
- The laws unreasonable handling of children which under the law should not have been born but have been born anyway.
EDIT: Just to be clear, there are many more ways to (slowly) shrink a countries population which are based on subtle nudging society in the intended direction instead of enforcing any hard limit on the number of children. Which is probably what China should have done, tbh.
However, non of this will happen. We are still in a world where countries fight over getting more resources to consume. That needs to shift to fighting to protect resources. We need sanctions on countries that fish too much and have too high emissions. Otherwise we will be caught in the tragedy of the commons till the planet is uninhabitable.
Meanwhile we cannot even properly coordinate a response to a pandemic.
China is big so when it does things like this it tends to have a larger impact than other countries' practices. Also it has been growing very fast, and we tend to notice things that are changing. China's assertiveness on the world stage also causes anxiety which has a halo effect on China's other actions/policies.
There are very few countries who can even come close to that - probably only the US qualifies. Even then, China has twice the CO2 emissions than the US, more than three times the emissions of the entire EU, and more than a magnitude more CO2 emissions than coal dependent countries like Germany. Furthermore, China's CO2 emissions are also higher than any other country in history.
China fishes illegally and under false flags all over the world, using a government sponsored fishing fleet.
This is all because the CCP needs to ensure progress in welfare which would be threatened by shortages in meat or fish. Otherwise, the Chinese citizens would perhaps not continue to accept the repressive regime.
But do we smaller countries accept these transgressions? Fishing the territorial waters of smaller states empty should be considered an act of war - which it would be if it weren't for China's relative power distance compared to local neighbors.
All of this is frankly unacceptable and needs to be called out. Small countries need to band together and present China with a strong opposition. This should and can not depend on the US. We need to learn from history. The increasing imperialism by the CCP should be a warning!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I expect the per-capita gap to shrink further in the next few years. China's much higher absolute emissions are largely a function of its much larger population.
So unlike Trumps white house. Given the timing of release of report I wouldn't put it beyond election FUD operations under the guise of some credible report.
[keep it coming racists. November is coming]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-squid-climate.html https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/23/octopuse...
I've already witnessed the collapse of fishing in the oceans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Or else we learn to manage resource or something.
Like, it just seems like a bad news generator and we constantly need to dance around the CCP trying to guide them appropriately with sanctions, and threats and incentives.
I understand depleting the oceans would be catastrophic, but how is this regime ever going to learn? Honest question?
Well someone has to choose what bad news to highlight and how biased to highlight said news. For example, per capita, Taiwan and S.Korea have larger DWF fleets, Taiwan significantly so. Factor in EEZ and you get a good idea of why.
China: 1400m ppl / 3000 dwf fleet / 900,000km2 eez (3.8m with disputes)
Taiwan: 24m / 414 / 90,000km2
Japan: 162m / 162 / 4,500,000km2
S.Korea: 52m / 198 / 300,00km2
Spain: 47m / 65 / 1,000,000km2
https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
This EEZ map really explains a lot of tensions in these maritime disputes.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7292/10134658063_fca4fc3da2_o...
> the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions.
???? The article doesn't go any further, but how would you use a bunch of unarmed fishing vessels crewed by "illiterates" (according to the article) for anything resembling a military purpose. Later on it mentions "crowding" but doesn't really go into detail about what that means.
Plus what is a "distant water fishing fleet"? The article gives numbers for overall number of fishing vessels and then "distant water fishing fleet", but only provides context for the later number by saying the US has only 300 such boats in its fleet. If a country with coasts on two oceans only has 300 of these, it has to be some really specific category of boat right? What makes this category important?
And of course there's the framing of the article, the fishing is done by private commercial fishers but apparently their entire country is to blame. I mean you can make some arguments about subsidies but then the article itself acknowledges that other countries also engage in similar level of subsidies.
Also there's this weird fixation on North Korea, where it claims the Chinese fishing fleet is depleting North Korean waters, but doesn't really tell us about whether or not that's done with North Korea's permission. It mentions that it would be technically illegal for NK to sell fishing rights, but that doesn't really bear any significance.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Urbina
> As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment...
As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries. These sentiments seem to align with the values promoted by the Yale School of the Environment [1]. The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
[1] https://environment.yale.edu/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/china-illegal-fishing-fleet...
He might have an expert level knowledge on the topic, but he is using all the standard tricks journalists use to paint a narrative. Bringing up statistics without context and without defining the thing it's measuring, using technical terminology without explaining what it means, alluding to certain things without elaborating, and citing sources(if at all) in a way such that you have to spend a lot of time hunting down an actual document supporting his claims.
> The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
evidence of what? I'm not denying that Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea. It still seems weird that in a situation where Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea's waters, the fixation is on sanctions. I can understand this being bad if North Korea doesn't want Chinese boats fishing in their waters but both articles seem to imply that there is implicit approval, in which case who cares? Sanctions are antithetical to free trade and human welfare.
Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry? Are there 100,000 distant-water vessels active in the world? Or only 25,000 total?
If the Chinese represent 20% of the world industry, but are trying to feed 18% of the world's population, that doesn't seem outrageous. But if they represent 50% of the world industry, then my eyebrows go up.
At the same time, if the US represents 10% of the industry and 4% of world population, or if UK represents 3% of the industry but <1% of world population, doesn't that make it a bit hard to swallow?
Almost all of the numbers above are made up. I don't know what they really are. That's my point. I'm reluctant to grab my pitchfork with my current level of ignorance.
For comparison, the 2nd/3rd/4th largest distant-water fleets are Taiwan at around 400 and Japan and S. Korea at around 150-200 [0]. Probably the entire rest of the world accounts for less than 10% of foreign fishing.
[0] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...