by Kyle Ferrana
edited by Natalia Burdyńska

The audiences of typical television networks and major newspapers in the Western world today may detect, in their coverage of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a faint but insistent vexation over the fact that the PRC remains at peace. Wars are ongoing in almost every region of the world, including very near a few of China’s borders,¹ yet the PRC itself has stubbornly refused to drop any bombs nor so much as fire a bullet at its regional rivals. Any action taken by the Chinese government or even vessels of the Chinese coast guard that can in any way be construed as hostile is magnified many times by the press, such as its use of water cannons to defend territorial claims in the South China Sea,² which sometimes receives equal coverage as news of actual bombings and massacres in Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza, despite a lack of casualties. For years we have been told that China is ready for war, or preparing for war, and that the People’s Liberation Army (which has not fought a war for several decades) is poised to attack Taiwan, or perhaps even somewhere else, at a moment’s notice.

The truth is that China is at war, just not the kind of war that Western governments, especially the United States’, wish to see it fight. China’s wars are not with other countries, but with poverty, with climate change, and with hunger. They are the types of wars that are not only unsensational to the Western press, but even embarrassing. China’s extraordinary—in some cases, even exponential—progress in the production of zero-emissions energy, electric vehicles, and high-speed railways, for example, is putting the United States to shame,³ as its “Magnificent Seven” tech giants plow hundreds of billions of dollars into the production of largely fossil fuel-powered AI data centers. Gasoline consumption and carbon emissions from China are now falling years ahead of schedule as electric vehicles rapidly replace internal combustion engines and renewables rapidly replace coal, despite China’s continuing role in manufacturing an enormous share of the entire world’s consumer products. Exports of renewable energy technology from China to its partner countries are also already having measurable effects in reducing their emissions.⁴

Even less attention is paid to China’s efforts to fight hunger and promote sustainable food production, though in many ways this struggle is far more crucial. Carbon emissions are not the only threat to our planet’s environments. Deforestation, desertification, and overfishing are also rapidly bringing entire ecosystems to the point of collapse, and more species to the brink of extinction. The demand for pasture land and seafood is a critical driver of the reckless depletion of the Earth’s natural resources, and if this demand cannot be reduced or met in a sustainable manner, the collapse will eventually take the form of ubiquitous hunger and mass starvation. Already, according to statistics tracked by the World Bank, the average prevalence of undernourishment in the world has begun increasing, from a minimum of 7% in 2018, to 9% in 2022. China has avoided this trend, reaching the lowest level of undernourishment of any country or region in the world in 2010 and remaining there to this day.^{5 6}

A serious effort to make food production sustainable in China is currently underway, and has made remarkable progress in the realm of aquaculture. China consumes an enormous quantity of fish and seafood, far more than any other country;⁷ yet the amount that it draws from the ocean is now decreasing, thanks to a generations-long effort to expand domestic fish farming. Since 1983, the last year that the volume of fish and seafood produced by capture fisheries (wild fish caught in the ocean) was greater than the volume produced by aquaculture, the output of Chinese aquaculture has increased by approximately 2,000%. Wild fishing by Chinese vessels now accounts for a smaller volume than it did in 1996, and Chinese aquaculture now produces more than five times as much as wild fishing per year, as of 2022.⁸ 

Neither is aquaculture development limited to China’s coastal areas. According to Singapore-based magazine Aqua Culture Asia Pacific, China’s far-west region of Xinjiang—in fact the region of the Earth farthest from any ocean—boasts a thriving and expanding network of aquaculture farms, supported by the government and managed by farmers’ cooperatives, that cultivate over a hundred different species of fish.⁹ In 2023, Chinese aquaculture firm Xinjiang Shi Shi Xian completed a pilot program to create saltwater fisheries in the autonomous region, allowing marine fish to be cultivated even at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert.¹⁰ 

Today, not only does China produce more in aquaculture than the rest of the world combined,¹¹ but the rate of its expansion has also remained steady for three decades, and shows no sign of slowing down. Additionally, Chinese aquaculture is becoming increasingly industrialized, preserving water through standardized recycling, preserving land by combining fish farms with rice cultivation, and reducing the emissions involved by farming more fish species with lower carbon footprints.

At the same time, the government is aggressively scaling back wild fisheries. Goals for the reduction of domestic fishing fleets, announced in 2017,¹² were exceeded by 2020, with 40,000 fishing vessels (about 15% of the total) taken off the water so far.¹³ Fuel subsidies to Chinese fishermen are being replaced with retirement subsidies, and more regulations and limitations on wild fishing are being put in place.¹⁴

It is difficult for an average Westerner to learn these facts, because doing so requires actively and consciously seeking them out. They are not part of the narrative that Western governments wish their presses to print. China must everywhere and at all times be increasingly hostile, warlike, and ready to strike at the drop of a hat; the story of rogue Chinese fishing fleets running amok across the world’s oceans can never become less true. The size and audacity of these fleets must always be on the rise, at least in the minds of Western audiences, never mind that the opposite is happening in reality.

Aquaculture is not without drawbacks. There are many critics of aquacultural fish farming, who often point to adverse environmental effects or the need to provide farmed fish with wild-caught feedstock. However, as Chinese aquaculture matures, such issues are also being capably addressed with equal attention. For example, a recent report by the Global Mangrove Alliance found that from 2000 to 2020, China had mitigated the damage aquaculture had wrought upon its mangrove-rich wetland areas, and through careful protection and afforestation efforts had increased its mangrove area by 1.8% per year, making it one of the few countries in the world with a net increase in mangrove area, as well as the world leader in scientific achievements in mangrove research.¹⁵ The solution to wild feed requirements is, inevitably, more farming, allowing the feedstock to eventually be cultivated as well.

The benefits of fish farming are also not limited to sustainability and food security. By pioneering large-scale aquaculture, China can provide a roadmap for other seafood-consuming countries to do the same. The preservation of the world’s oceans and preventing the extinction of myriad fish species must be a collective effort; even if China ended its wild fisheries entirely, other countries with less sustainable fishing fleets may fill the gap, expanding their fishing ranges to absorb the territory China’s fleets have abandoned. An ocean is by nature too vast to be contained, and legal restrictions have little to no effect internationally, with a plethora of bad actors taking advantage of under-patrolled waters. Yet if competition can finally give way to cooperation, these problems can be eliminated to the benefit of all. Increasingly, the government of the PRC, at least, is pursuing internationalism and global cooperation in maritime affairs: in its 14th Five-Year Plan, it expressed a commitment to building a “maritime community of common destiny” (海洋命运共同体).

Presently, China is one of several countries with overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea. Curiously, despite the outsized attention paid to clashes between Chinese and other countries’ vessels in this region by the Western press, the disputed territory is relatively unremarkable, containing no inhabited islands. A discerning reader may ask, upon learning to what lengths the claimants will go to contest these waters: what is it about the South China Sea, then, that these countries are interested in?

For China, the answer clearly lies in the South China Sea’s strategic location. Surrounded as China’s only coastline is by the allies and military installations of an increasingly belligerent United States, the South China Sea represents the only conduit for maritime trade that does not have a gun pointed at it. Were control of these waters to pass to a U.S. ally such as the Philippines, the threat of closing this conduit would have severe consequences for the economic lives and safety of China’s population of 1.4 billion people.

Control over the South China Sea would bring little benefit to the Philippines’ trade routes, on the other hand, as the Philippine archipelago has numerous unobstructed coastlines and broad access to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, the Philippines’ interest in the region has more to do with securing territory for its wild fisheries. If China’s interest in fishing the disputed regions of the South China Sea were to dry up, a lasting peaceful arrangement between the two countries may become far more likely. In the final analysis, international conflict is often driven by economic concerns, and the division of scarce resources; sustainability is therefore a preventative measure against wars with other countries, which are after all not the wars that the People’s Republic seeks to fight.

__________________________

¹The prolonged civil war in Myanmar in particular, but neighboring regions have also seen a concerning increase in military skirmishes, such as between Cambodia and Thailand and between Pakistan and India in the summer of 2025.

²Jim Gomez, “Philippines Condemns Chinese Coast Guard’s Use of Water Cannon on a Research Vessel,” AP News (Manila, Philippines), May 22, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/south-china-sea-sandy-cay-philippines-a9f7522ee0d3c71fddce8a3e81543107.

³David Gelles et al., “There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.,” The New York Times, June 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china-clean-energy-power.html.

⁴Lauri Myllyvirta, Analysis: China’s Clean-Energy Exports in 2024 Alone Will Cut Overseas CO2 by 1% (Carbon Brief, 2025), https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-clean-energy-exports-in-2024-alone-will-cut-overseas-co2-by-1/.

⁵World Bank, Prevalence of Undernourishment (% of Population) – China, World, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America & Caribbean, North America, Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan, Euro Area, SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS, Food and Agriculture Organization (The World Bank Group, n.d.), accessed August 26, 2025, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS?locations=CN-1W-IN-ZG-ZJ-XU-ZQ-XC&name_desc=false.

⁶According to prominent Indian economist Amartya Sen, China enjoys a considerable lead over India in food distribution due to its farther-reaching social security programs. (Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, “China and India,” in Hunger and Public Action, ed. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford University Press, 1991), https://doi.org/10.1093/0198283652.003.0011.)

⁷Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024), Fish and Seafood – Production (Tonnes) (Our World in Data, 2022), https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-seafood-production?time=2022.

⁸Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, via World Bank (2025), Seafood Production: Wild Fish Catch vs. Aquaculture, China (Our World in Data, 2022), https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aquaculture?country=~CHN.

⁹Aqua Culture Asia Pacific, “Aquaculture Thrives in NW China’s Xinjiang,” AQUA CULTURE Asia Pacific, July 26, 2024, https://aquaasiapac.com/2024/07/26/aquaculture-thrives-in-nw-chinas-xinjiang/.

¹⁰Kinling Lo, “China’s Food Security: Xinjiang Develops Seawater Aquafarming in Desert Region amid Agriculture Focus,” South China Morning Post, August 31, 2023, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3232825/chinas-food-security-xinjiang-develops-seawater-aquafarming-desert-region-amid-agriculture-focus.

¹¹Weijun Chen and Shiyang Gao, “Current Status of Industrialized Aquaculture in China: A Review,” Environmental Science and Pollution Research 30, no. 12 (2023): 32278–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-25601-9.

¹²中华人民共和国农业农村部 (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China), “农业部关于进一步加强国内渔船管控 实施海洋渔业资源总量管理的通知 (Notice of the Ministry of Agriculture on Further Strengthening the Control of Domestic Fishing Vessels and Implementing Total Amount Management of Marine Fishery Resources),” 中华人民共和国农业农村部 (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China), January 16, 2017, http://www.moa.gov.cn/govpublic/YYJ/201701/t20170120_5460583.htm.

¹³Chun Zhang, “China’s Five-Year Plan for Fishing Focuses on Aquaculture,” Dialogue Earth, March 24, 2022, https://dialogue.earth/en/ocean/chinas-five-year-plan-for-fishing-focuses-on-aquaculture/.

¹⁴Kaiwen Wang et al., “Fisheries Subsidies Reform in China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 26 (2023): e2300688120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300688120.

¹⁵Global Mangrove Alliance, Report on China Mangrove Conservation and Restoration Strategy Research Project, Research (Global Mangrove Alliance, n.d.), 17–18, 2020, https://www.mangrovealliance.org/resources/report-on-chinas-mangrove-conservation/.

¹⁶中华人民共和国中央人民政府 (Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China), “中华人民共和国国民经济和社会发展第十四个五年规划和2035年远景目标纲要 (Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China and the Long-Term Objectives for 2035),” 新华社 (Xinhua News Agency), March 13, 2021, https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-03/13/content_5592681.htm.

***

Kyle Ferrana is a writer, editor, tenant unionist, and political activist based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Why the World Needs China (Clarity Press, 2024) and a contributor to Monthly Review, The International Magazine, and Peace, Land, and Bread. He currently serves as a writer and organizer for the U.S. Committee of the Friends of Socialist China and for the Oregon China Council.