the yellow croaker war:
FISHERY DISPUTES
BETWEEN CHINA AND JAPAN, 1925–1935

MICAH MUSCOLINO

ABSTRACT

Beginning in the 1920s, the convergence of ecological transformations that originated in China and Japan gave rise to protracted disputes over yellow croaker fishing grounds off of China's southeast coast. These conflicts highlight the importance of transnational perspectives in marine environmental history. Geopolitics influenced patterns of marine resource exploitation, as Japan's diplomatic and military advantage prevented the Chinese government from excluding the Japanese fleet from yellow croaker fishing grounds. Motivated by a mutual understanding of fishery expansion as a way to strengthen the nation-state, Chinese and Japanese exploitation hastened the decline of yellow croaker resources by the late 1930s.

MANY FISH SPECIES are "fugitive" resources that migrate great distances over the course of their life cycles, cutting across the borders of multiple nation-states. As a result, the exploitation and management of marine resources frequently becomes a transnational or even a global issue. During the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese fishers' abandonment of inshore waters in favor of fishing grounds in more distant waters and the Japanese fleet's exhaustion of marine resources in the East China Sea brought them into competition for fishing grounds off the Zhoushan Archipelago, a chain of islands off the coast of China's Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. The intersection of these transnational ecological processes soon gave rise to diplomatic conflict. These disputes centered on large and small yellow croakers; marine fish species of vital importance to both Japan's and China's fishing industries.	1
Map 1. Maritime East Asia. Adapted from Map of China base map, Harvard Geospatial Library.
Faced with Japanese competition for yellow croaker fishing grounds, Chinese fishing enterprises urged their government to exclude technologically superior foreign vessels from China's "national" territorial waters. The Chinese government intervened to uphold its fishing industry's claims to yellow croaker fishing grounds, but the decline of inshore stocks had already drawn Chinese fishing boats into waters well beyond the three-mile limit accepted in international law during the 1920s and 1930s. Since neither Chinese nor Japanese boats could fish for yellow croaker in waters less than three miles from shore, the Chinese government had no way to counter Japanese incursions by appealing to international conventions. Given the unequal power relationship that existed between China and Japan during the 1920s and 1930s, moreover, the Chinese government could not risk trying to exclude Japanese vessels by extending their territorial waters beyond the internationally accepted three-mile limit. Faced with this obstacle, China's leaders employed a variety of other strategies to keep Japanese-caught fish out of Chinese markets, but once again Japan's position of diplomatic and military strength rendered these efforts ineffective.	2
Despite the transnational character of these ecological disputes, nation-centered perceptions of the marine environment shaped the controversies and influenced their eventual outcome. Chinese as well as Japanese participants in these conflicts understood control of the ocean and its resources as a vital means of fortifying the wealth and power of the nation-state. This understanding of the marine environment turned fishing disputes into a geopolitical struggle for material resources and national economic strength. As a result, the Chinese and Japanese fleets aggressively pursued large and small yellow croaker to avoid forfeiting them to foreign competitors. This transnational race to exploit the marine environment, in which diplomatic and military advantage gave the Japanese a clear upper hand, led to the depletion of yellow croaker stocks by the mid-1930s. Transformations of the marine environment gave rise to diplomatic conflict, and these geopolitical struggles ultimately intensified processes of environmental change.	. . .