Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fishing fleet. These vessels roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas, and military analysts believe the country uses the fleet for surveillance and to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will—according to a recent study, more than 100,000 fishermen die each year, and the conditions on Chinese ships, as Ian Urbina reports, are brutal.
In this massive investigation, Urbina documents the human-rights abuses and illicit fishing practices of China’s fishing industry. It’s a damning report on how the country has become a fishing superpower, but weaved within it is also an emotional, devastating story of one Indonesian worker who went aboard one of these ships to give his family a better life. Incredible reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari.
In February, 2022, I went with the conservation group Sea Shepherd and a documentary filmmaker named Ed Ou, who also translated on the trip, to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, and boarded a Chinese squid jigger there. The captain gave permission for me and a couple of my team members to roam freely as long as I didn’t name his vessel. He remained on the bridge but had an officer shadow me wherever I went. The mood on the ship felt like that of a watery purgatory. The crew was made up of thirty-one men; their teeth were yellowed from chain-smoking, their skin sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness. The scene recalled an observation of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who divided people into three categories: the living, the dead, and those at sea.
When squid latched on to a line, an automated reel flipped them onto a metal rack. Deckhands then tossed them into plastic baskets for sorting. The baskets often overflowed, and the floor filled shin-deep with squid. The squid became translucent in their final moments, sometimes hissing or coughing. (Their stink and stain are virtually impossible to wash from clothes. Sometimes crew members tie their dirty garments into a rope, up to twenty feet long, and drag it for hours in the water behind the ship.) Below deck, crew members weighed, sorted, and packed the squid for freezing. They prepared bait by carving squid up, separating the tongues from inside the beaks. In the galley, the cook noted that his ship had no fresh fruits or vegetables and asked whether we might be able to donate some from our ship.
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