Beijing at the Helm?: Examining the Chinese Distant Water Fishing Fleet under Global Governance

• Main Author: Brekke, Tarjei
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: CCAMLR; marine environmental governance; China; distant water fishing; fishing; policy analysis; actor analysis; global governance; Antarctica; marine governance; fishing industry; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/96334; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-98716

As geopolitical tensions between China and the West continue to foment, China’s distant water fishing vessels occupy a precarious space as both overrepresented on the lists of vessels engaging in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and as agents of China’s regional and global ambitions. With 2 701 vessels, the Chinese distant water fishing fleet remains the largest in the world by a margin of nearly two and a half thousand. As the flag State is responsible for vessels flying its flag, this criticism is justified under international maritime law. Yet how can China govern fishing vessels beyond its own maritime borders? Can the State government alone oversee all of these vessels? How does China’s distant water fishing governance reflect interactions between national and international approaches to marine environmental governance, and how does Chinese distant water fishing governance work in practice at the global level? This thesis argues that there are clear interactions between international and national approaches to marine environmental governance in China’s distant water fishing sector, and that these have shifted from China largely accepting international governance to gradually beginning to formulate differing approaches to governance regimes on the world oceans. In this thesis, I employ an analysis of five actors: The fishermen and fishing enterprises; the Chinese local governments; the State government; intergovernmental actors (both countries and organisations); and NGOs. In this analysis, I study how these actors interact with the distant water fishing sector in China, what their motivations are and how they influence the governance of the fleets. This analysis is aided by a policy analysis wherein I employ excerpts from key regulations of Chinese distant water fishing policy to demonstrate some of the existing implementation gaps in the sector. Finally, I make use of interviews with three experts in order to familiarise myself with examples and evaluations of practice, policies and recent ...