Why the Chinese Distant-Water Fleet off Peru Is a Governance Problem, Not Only an Illegal-Fishing Issue
- Introduction: A Line on the Water
On clear nights satellite images show a strip of light off South America’s Pacific coast bright enough to light up a city. The light comes from the lamps of hundreds of squid-fishing vessels, most of which fly the flag of the People’s Republic of China. They gather at a calculated distance, some 200 to 230 nautical miles off the coast of Peru, just outside the outer limit of Peru’s Exclusive Economic Zone. This fleet is an existential threat to Peruvian artisanal fishers, who rely on the same squid stock. It is talked of as a pillage of national waters by local associations and much of the press.
That framing of illegality, incursion, violated sovereignty shapes public debate. It is instinctive, and in some recorded cases it is true. But it does not tell the story of the phenomenon as a whole. And the gap matters. A wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong policy. This article thus poses one research question: Is the Chinese distant-water fleet off Peru best viewed as a problem of illegal fishing and violated sovereignty or as a symptom of a structural gap in the international law of the sea, and does the answer change what effective policy looks like?
The defining behaviour of the fleet (fishing just outside the EEZ) is not an accident. It is the organising logic of the whole operation. What Peru faces is a classic commons problem over a shared, mobile resource, expressed in the language of sovereignty. From this point of view, the target of policy changes from the coast line to the high-seas regime that now leaves the stock without effective management.
2. The Magnitude of the Phenomenon
China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet. Official figures place the number at around 2,700 vessels, but the Overseas Development Institute estimated the real number to be close to 17,000 when including smaller and support vessels (Gutiérrez et al., 2020), and a 2026 U.S. congressional report notes approximately 16,000 (Diálogo Américas, 2026). Several hundred of these vessels ply the southeastern Pacific each season. Their primary prey is the jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas, locally known as pota); many later move across to the South Atlantic to fish Argentine shortfin squid. The fleet has also affected other species. For instance, in 2017, the Chinese carrier vessel Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 was caught by Ecuador near the Galápagos Islands with thousands of sharks onboard, a case that still defines the fleet’s reputation in the area (Ellis, 2020).
The scale of the extraction has changed the market. China’s annual squid landings jumped 65 percent compared to the prior decade to over 400,000 metric tons between 2020 and 2024, bumping Peru as the world’s top producer. Peru accounted for 51 percent of landings, China 41 percent and Chile 7 percent between 2019 and 2023 (SeafoodSource, 2026). The most vulnerable segment of the Peruvian fishing sector is bearing the costs. Squid is the country’s second largest fishery and the most important fishery for artisanal fishers, with over 11,000 fishers and some 3,000 vessels, with exports historically valued at some USD 860 million a year (Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, 2021). Artisanal associations claim that one industrial vessel can catch in a day what a local fisher lands in a year and directly link falling catches and rising domestic squid prices to the foreign fleet (Diálogo Américas, 2024). The problem is thus not only ecological and geopolitical but social as well, which is why the language of “plunder” resonates so strongly.
3. The Legality Paradox
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Arts. 55–57), the coastal state has sovereign rights over the living resources of its EEZ out to 200 nautical miles. Beyond this is the high seas, where under Article 87 all states have a guaranteed freedom to fish, subject only to general duties of conservation (Arts. 116–119) (United Nations, 1982). So a vessel fishing at 220 or 230 nautical miles is exercising a recognised legal freedom. Hence, that act is not illegal fishing, and it is not a violation of the sovereignty of Peru.
This is the paradox that is captured by the sovereignty frame. The business’s legal architecture is the fleet’s position just outside the EEZ. The vessels are precisely where Peruvian jurisdiction ends. The squid, however, does not see the boundary. It is a straddling stock, crossing the 200-mile line, so squid caught legally at 210 miles are, biologically speaking, the same squid that would otherwise migrate inshore to the artisanal grounds. The catch is legally separate but ecologically the same. So it is a category error to call the whole phenomenon “illegal fishing” and as it leads the policy response astray.
That is not to say the fleet has been running clean. At the margins, there are well-documented real violations: incursions across the EEZ line, port entries without the tracking devices required by Peruvian law, systematic switching-off of Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, and forced-labour complaints on vessels linked to the fleet (Mongabay Latam, 2023). But these are the by-products. The main activity is still legal fishing on the high seas. The real scandal is not what is breaking the rules, but what the rules allow.
The institution supposed to bridge this gap, which is the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), is the problem rather than the solution. It only adopted its first conservation measure for squid in 2020 (Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, 2021). The current version restricts participation to 766 authorized jigging vessels, 671 of which are Chinese, but does not establish a science-based limit on the total catch (SPRFMO, 2023). CALAMASUR, a regional industry coalition, argues that the organisation failed to deliver its original purpose over more than a decade: China took an estimated five million tons of squid without scientific quotas, while artisanal fishers in coastal states were stuck with exactly such quotas at home (SeafoodSource, 2026). And that asymmetry is the crux of the matter. The industrial high-seas fleet is essentially unrationed, while the small-scale coastal fleet is rationed. An inequity born of the governance gap, not of any one act of poaching.
4. Peru’s Legal Response and Its Unintended Consequences
Peru has developed a serious enforcement-based response. As of 2020, squid vessels from abroad entering Peruvian ports must have an additional satellite tracking device (Mongabay Latam, 2024). Further, Supreme Decree No. 014-2024-PRODUCE established that any foreign-flagged fishing vessel wanting to enter Peru for any reason must have and activate the national SISESAT tracking system, processed through the Foreign Trade Single Window (VUCE), and must not be on the international lists of illegal fishing offenders (Ministerio de la Producción, 2024). Weeks later, the government authorized the armed forces to use legitimate force against illegal maritime activity (Diálogo Américas, 2025). This is a sensible tightening of coastal state control on paper.
It is vitiated by two problems. The first is that enforcement in the EEZ cannot affect the activity that counts because that activity is legally carried out outside the EEZ. Implementation has also been weak. Mongabay Latam (2023) documented dozens of Chinese vessels arriving at Peruvian ports without the required device, exploiting exemptions for crew changes that lawyers deemed to be in violation of the regulation itself. In July 2026, these weaknesses were officially confirmed in an audit by the Comptroller General of Peru (Contraloría). It found that the Monitoring Centre of the Production Ministry has no action protocols in the event of a foreign vessel turning off its satellite signal, that the supervision of the system functions only during office hours, and that the Ministry does not coordinate with the Navy in a manner that allows effective control of the squid fleet operating at the edge of Peru’s 200 miles (Estrada, 2026). In other words, the surveillance tool at the core of Peru’s strategy doesn’t even work as intended: a fleet fishing around the clock is being observed on a business schedule.
The second problem is more revealing: the measures displaced rather than restrained the fleet. Monitoring was not accepted, but the vessels remained at sea for 18 months to two years, resupplied by support ships, worsening the forced-labour risks that had alarmed observers and even using a hospital vessel to avoid medical port calls, reported the Peruvian fisheries consultancy Artisonal (Mongabay Latam, 2024). After the 2024 decree, Chinese port calls in Peru declined to almost nil and switched to Chilean ports such as Iquique (SeafoodSource, 2025). By the end of 2025, analysts reported not a single Chinese entry into Peruvian waters (UPI, 2025). Peru’s policy was a success by its own coast’s standards. By the health of the stock, it changed little. The fleet continues to fish, one line further out and one country further south. This is the hallmark of a misdiagnosed problem; an intervention that is competent but aimed at the wrong target.
5. What Beijing Says and Why their Rhetoric Works
The official Chinese position fits the legality paradox to the letter. Following the advent of regional criticism in 2020, Chinese officials have announced “zero tolerance” for illegal fishing, characterized China as a responsible fishing country, emphasized voluntary high seas moratoria, and maintained that the conduct of individual vessels cannot be attributed to the state or used to brand an entire country as an illegal-fishing actor (NBC News, 2023).
From the sovereignty frame this appears to be evasion. From the frame of governance it is largely and inconveniently true: the difference between the conduct of individual vessels and the lawful activity of the fleet is exactly the difference the law of the sea makes. The truth behind the rhetoric is the other way around: every restriction Beijing cites is voluntary, self-policed and can be withdrawn at any time. China is not supporting illegality. It is a defense of a freedom which the law grants and a void that the law has not filled. That position is so much harder to oppose than open lawbreaking, and that is exactly why the sovereignty frame keeps losing to it.
6. Lawful Does Not Mean Legitimate
There is a substantial body of expert opinion rejecting the more generous implications of the “legal fleet” reading, and it deserves serious engagement. Ellis (2020) contends that the fleet’s activities are in fact a breach of Latin America’s sovereign waters and an extermination of entire species, and that Beijing’s failure to respond to ships flying its flag erodes the region’s ability to trust Chinese firms in any sector. Pedrozo (2022) goes even further. He says IUU fishing is the biggest maritime security threat in the world, and those Chinese vessels changing their names and turning off their satellite tracking should be treated as stateless vessels subject to the jurisdiction of all states.
A second school of criticism questions the notion of the fleet as a regular commercial user of the commons. Some 20 percent of global fisheries subsidies, or USD 7.2 billion, come from China (Pedrozo, 2022, p. 328), and much distant-water fishing would be unprofitable without state support for fuel, hulls, and even security and medical ships that allow captains to stay at sea longer (The Outlaw Ocean Project, 2021). Urbina (2020) describes how this subsidized expansion depletes the oceans and exacerbates geopolitical tensions. Security analysts point out that elements of China’s fishing fleet also function as a maritime militia, turning its presence into a gray-zone instrument of state power (Diálogo Américas, 2026). To treat the fleet as a lawful market actor is to mistake a state-built strategic tool for an ordinary industry, and legal formalism becomes complacency.
In practice sovereignty can be compromised without being infringed in law, and a subsidised fleet warps the commons it lawfully exploits. Yet, on closer inspection, they support rather than undermine the governance argument. The subsidy critique points to a governance fix as the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, not a naval one. Pedrozo’s proposal on statelessness is an implicit call for reform of the legal regime, an admission, albeit tacit, that enforcement under the current rules cannot succeed. And if the fleet is in part an instrument of state power, then the patrols of a single coastal state are all the less sufficient, and a collective regional response all the more necessary. What really divides them is not whether the problem transcends the sovereignty frame (they all agree that it does) but whether the answer is securitisation or regulation.
7. From Sovereignty to the Commons
If the core activity is lawful, the problem is not a border to defend but a shared resource to govern, and the decisive tools are collective. This is exactly the situation for which the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement was written; straddling stocks which no one coastal State can manage alone and which require cooperation between coastal and distant-water fishing states through regional organisations (United Nations, 1995). The instrument is there. What is essential is a binding, science-based cap on total catch at SPRFMO (not just a freeze on numbers of vessels) that would ration the industrial fleet as stringently as Peru already rations its artisanal fleet. The second tool is market and coalition power. CALAMASUR, a coalition of squid producers from Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, has shown that organised coastal-state actors can influence the SPRFMO agenda (Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, 2021) and that conditions on access to key import markets can affect the economics of the fleet where patrol boats cannot. The line in the water is real in law, and meaningless in biology. A policy fixated on defending the line will continue to lose to a fleet that fishes it because it is a line.
8. Conclusion
The Chinese distant-water fleet off Peru is regularly labeled as illegal fishing and an assault on sovereignty. That description captures real abuses at the margins as incursions, blacked-out transponders, labour abuses; but it misreads the whole picture. The fleet is distinctive because it is fishing legally on the high seas for a straddling stock on the edge of national jurisdiction. Returning to the research question, the fleet is better understood as a symptom of a structural governance gap than as mere illegality, even if the strongest counter-arguments rightly warn that its subsidised, state-linked character makes it more than an ordinary commercial actor.
The answer matters because it changes policy. However, Peru’s enforcement-first response, as competent as it was, was aimed at the wrong domain: it drained the fleet from Peruvian ports and waters and left the stock exposed a mile past the line. The more promising route is through binding catch limits at SPRFMO under the Fish Stocks Agreement, coordinated coastal-state advocacy of the sort modeled by CALAMASUR, subsidy discipline at the WTO, and conditions on market access. None of this satisfies the natural instinct to repel an intruder. But for the most part the intruder is a legal user of a badly governed commons and one can not defend a commons one coastline at a time. If Peru and its neighbouring countries want the squid back, the crucial battle is not at 230 nautical miles offshore. It stands in the rooms where the rules of the high seas are written. Until then, Peru will have sovereignty over its waters and no power over its squid.
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