A Clear Look at China’s Deep-Sea Fishing
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Graphics produced by The Times’s International desk show how China out-fishes the competition, casting right up against the edge of the law.
By Terence McGinley
Oct. 9, 2022
When Steven Lee Myers was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, the sea was often on his mind. China’s rising position in the world could often be explained on the water: island building in the South China Sea, saber rattling in the Taiwan Strait, a growing middle class eating up all the wild sea cucumbers in the Yellow Sea.
That is why Mr. Myers paused in 2020 when he read news reports that Ecuador was protesting the presence of Chinese fishing boats near its territorial waters. He wondered how Chinese vessels could be bothering a small South American nation on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Myers caught the “germ of the idea,” one that grew into a recent Times report that shows just how active China’s global fishing operation is.
China has fishing operations all over the world. So do other countries, but near the Galápagos, no other country comes close to China’s fishing effort. The Times project focuses on the fishing grounds off Ecuador, Peru and Argentina, where China is out-fishing 35 other nations,including South Korea, Spain and Taiwan, combined. It does so to feed an increasingly prosperous population, and under direction from the government. With its own fisheries depleted, huge hauls of catch, such as tuna and squid, are matters of national food security to China.
As he started reporting in 2020, Mr. Myers, who is now posted in San Francisco to cover global disinformation, dived into the world of deepwater fishing and China’s might in the system. He spoke to experts, including the conservation group Oceana, which helped create the online platform and research organization Global Fishing Watch. The group had counted how many Chinese ships were gathering squid near the Galápagos Islands — and noted how deftly the ships skirted the boundary of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone. Mr. Myers approached his editors with a question: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could show this?”
That’s when the graphics editors came in. Agnes Chang, a visual editor on the International desk, said that a graphics story at The New York Times should show, clearly, something you didn’t know before. Ms. Chang and her teammates worked with Global Fishing Watch to analyze the group’s data, which uses ship transponders to track movement, and used that data to build the visualizations in the article.
The article’s lead graphic, a 3-D animation over a hemisphere of the Earth with South America at the center, displays a data subset from Global Fishing Watch with more than 95 million rows of data. It shows small circles, representing Chinese ships, swarming the waters around South America in fishing patterns in 2020 and 2021. Notably, they’re “fishing the line”: going right up against nations’ boundary lines, but not across. Local groups argue this depletes their stocks, since populations of fish don’t recognize maritime territories.
“It takes the law and pushes right up to the edge of it,” Mr. Myers said of the Chinese fleet.
The graphics team tried different sequences to see what made the article the most clear to readers. The final product provides a smooth, interactive experience. As readers scroll through the article online, the animation shifts from Ecuador to Peru to Argentina. Text accompanies the graphics to help readers contextualize what they are seeing.
One character can usually help drive a story. Often that’s a person who has lived the issues under examination. Without people to profile in its fishing investigation, the International desk instead told the story of one vessel, the Hai Feng 718, a refrigerated cargo ship whose activity helps explain China’s capacity to fish. The Hai Feng has enough room to relieve smaller fishing vessels of their catch and refill their fuel tanks, allowing these vessels to fish nearly 365 days a year.
One graphic in the article traces the Hai Feng’s yearlong path from the Galápagos to Chinese ports, to Chinese vessels near Argentina. Through the Sunda Strait and past the Cape of Good Hope, it evokes the path of Magellan, or Ahab’s Pequod.
From his new post in California, more than two years after the germ of the idea, Mr. Myers, who reported in Russia, Iraq and Washington before his time in Asia, marveled at the visuals his colleagues produced.
“It was even shocking for me to see what it looked like,” he said, adding: “You don’t know what you don’t know until you see it.”
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