Name: How China uses fishing boats for military power | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T16:56:48.000Z
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Christmas Day last year, viewed from the heavens it looks uncanny, like an alien life form taking shape.

But what these satellite images show is around 2,000 fishing boats grouping together to form an ocean barrier more than 450 kilometers long.

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Boats like these held a formation in heavy seas for some 30 hours before dispersing.

Two weeks later they were back for a formation of around 1,000 boats.

It was the third of its kind, as far as we know.

Those fishing boats were Chinese, and that ocean flash mob was a display of power, a threat.

It's the latest flex of Beijing's grey zone militia strategy.

Observers have been watching what's going on as carefully as they can.

For every one Chinese military vessel, there are five Chinese fishing vessels in the area.

That becomes an enormous burden, particularly if you care about preserving civilian life, which, if you're Taiwan or the U.S., you probably do.

But also, they don't always just have nets on board.

I think it falls into two categories: specialized and general.

Specialized would be the militia units who have been trained,

and training for years probably, to do specific jobs, whether that's help with logistics, bringing supplies for a landing force, or whether that's intelligence collection, or mine sweeping is an example that also occasionally gets brought up.

Those would probably be relatively small in number.

I think the more general problem would be the way that they could flood the zone and complicate surveillance and targeting for the U.S.

or Taiwan or Japan, meaning if there was, say, an invasion scenario, which I think is maybe more problematic here than a blockade or a quarantine,

and you were trying to degrade Chinese forces crossing the strait and you're, say, Taiwan.

We've seen exactly that in skirmishes between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea, that although most are ordinary fishing boats, some have reinforced hulls and carry jamming equipment.

They've been seen supporting the Chinese Navy by swarming, maneuvering dangerously close, and physically bumping other boats.

It's so effective in the Philippines that there's talk of an iron triangle around the archipelago, where fishing vessels, coast guard ships, and

An Australian Naval Institute report calls these boats "warships in fishermen's clothing." The Chinese have talked for decades about the importance of harnessing civilian resources to support national security objectives, whether warfighting objectives or what the Chinese call sovereignty enforcement operations.

And that's what they call, for example, all the use of fishing boats in the South China Sea to harass Vietnamese oil drilling operations or Malaysian fishing operations or whatever.

They have organized those boats into maritime militia organizations and mobilized them to conduct operations in support of the national interest.

So they've been talking about it for a long time.

They don't tell us how many boats they have enlisted in the maritime militia,

but it's many hundreds, if not thousands, of small vessels and a couple of hundred large vessels that are definitely involved in the militia.

Taiwan has experienced this swarm as part of the ongoing campaign of Chinese pressure.

The democratic island was occupied for decades by Japan until 1945,

but is claimed by China as its territory.

The idea with this is that if there was a Taiwan contingency, that China's demonstrating that not only could it control the area around Taiwan, it could also kind of stop other actors, whether that's the U.S.-aligned Japan or U.S.

forces coming from the Philippines, stop them from coming to Taiwan's aid.

Non-military boats from China have popped up in incidents in other places.

In 2023, a Chinese-registered vessel named New New Polar Bear, not a fishing boat in this case, reportedly damaged two subsea data cables and a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea in northern Europe.

A second incident occurred in November 2024 when two subsea communications cables connecting Germany and Finland and Lithuania and Sweden, respectively, were reportedly severed by the Chinese civilian vessel Yi Pang.

But now the military militia is sailing in other waters.

That swarm we saw at the start of the video was close to Japan.

Most international attention focuses on China's ambitions for Taiwan,

but China and Japan have a long rivalry with an intense dispute over the Tokyo-administered Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyu Islands.

And last November, new Prime Minister Sanei Takaichi enraged Beijing by suggesting she'd come to Taiwan's aid if China were to try and take it by force.

We don't have that soundbite, but it's clear China's approach to Taiwan is on her mind.

Analysts believe the maneuver near Japan was part of a broader strategy of building up the fishing boat fleet.

The formations on Christmas Day were first spotted by geospatial analysis company IngeniSpace, based in the U.S.

Chief Operating Officer Jason Wang told me in a telephone interview that things were getting bigger fast.

So, yeah, the Chinese use the maritime militia every they practice on a regular basis.

And we see as few as a dozen ships to as many as 200, 300 ships.

What's unusual about this last couple of months is that we've seen it scale beyond 1,000 ships.

And in this case, Christmas Day was over 2,000.

Like a flash mob, the fishing boat swarm near Japan didn't stay for long.

But it was a signal that could be interpreted as putting pressure on Japan.

As I call it, a symbolic blockade, a kind of a blockade gesture and not an actual physical warfighting blockade where you are going to physically prevent people getting through at whatever cost.

So it might be done because this exercise might represent something they think about doing in some future crisis.

If so, it's probably not a Taiwan crisis.

It's probably something like yet another confrontation with the Japanese over access to the Senkaku Islands or the Diaoyu Islands, as the Chinese call them.

The fishing boat swarm has been followed by other incidents.

In February this year, Japanese authorities seized a Chinese fishing boat that tried to flee when ordered to stop for an inspection.

The vessel was in Japan's exclusive economic zone off Nagasaki Prefecture, in the southwest, when it was intercepted and its captain arrested.

The subsequent row prompted a sharp drop in visits to Japan by Chinese tourists.

Japan even sent its last two pandas back to China.

China employs widespread toolbox of different ways to intimidate countries.

They've been using that toolbox against Japan.

So alongside, particularly, incursions into islands claimed by both Japan and China, as well as economics, some sanctions being put on Japanese exports and also kind of encouraging Chinese tourists not to visit Japan.

That toolbox includes these grey zone tactics: militarized but not military actions that are well short of attacks,

but are still intentional and intimidating.

China is working on building the capability to conduct various large-scale military operations.

This is one component, a rather small component, of the overall effort to be ready and able to conduct a large-scale operation, whether combat operation or non-combat, in the vicinity around China.

The fishing militia are part of a war-without-gunsmoke strategy in the region.

Japan cannot directly engage any of these vessels.

That would break international rules for preventing collisions at sea.

It's currently doubling its defense spending to 2% of GDP.

Part of that will go to expand and modernize the Japanese coast guard.

Tokyo has also been deepening security ties with the United States and has staged joint exercises with the Philippines and the United States, increasing patrols and surveillance.

We've seen how these fishing boat militias are putting pressure on governments and their navies in several areas of Chinese interest.

I think it's certainly relevant in that it makes the Japanese sit up and take notice.

And it wasn't that far from Korea's exclusive economic zones either.

The question is: just how dangerous are these tactics?

Could they go wrong and end up starting something military by accident?

For every one Chinese coast guard vessel or navy vessel out there, you have multiple militia vessels, these professional militia vessels, that sometimes are ramming Filipino or Vietnamese boats just like the Chinese coast guard are, except that they're only half-trained and they're under perhaps looser command and control.

And so the last thing you want in a highly tense environment where maybe the difference between escalation and peace wrestling a knife's edge is some nationalistic half-trained fisherman deciding that he wants to be a hero.