Pelagic Imperialism in the 21st Century? A Geopolitical Economy of China's Distant Water Fishing Industry

ABSTRACT China is the home of the world's largest distant water fishing (DWF) fleet. Narratives of its expansion portray China as a voracious consumer of ocean resources, as a serial abuser of labour and as aggressively expanding into developing country waters in an ‘extractivist’ drive that destroys small scale fishers' livelihoods. Yet, what does taking a historical and relational view tell us about China's activities vis‐à‐vis other DWF nations? Is the relationship with coastal states an example of ‘neocolonialism’ or, as the Chinese party‐state insists, ‘mutual benefit’? And should one read China's DWF fleet as a tool of ‘grand strategy’ directed from Beijing or as rational profit‐seeking individual firms, opportunistically driven into new frontiers by the exhaustion of domestic resources? This article seeks to navigate these binaries to argue that China's DWF fleet is the most recent example in a long history of pelagic imperialism by advanced capitalist fishing interests, where fish are a raw material in a wider generative industrial strategy and fishing activity is a tool in geopolitics. It is argued that China's DWF fleet is best understood as a relatively coherent cluster of capitals‐in‐competition, set in a mosaic of variegated state‐capital relations, in tension at different relational scales. The article also offers suggestions for future research on DWF industries.