A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder

China has expanded an armada of far-flung fishing vessels. And this has come at a grave human toll.

I come to you today with a body of reporting that is truly unique. 

Over the past 4 years, The Outlaw Ocean Project investigated a wide variety of human rights and environmental concerns associated with the world’s seafood supply chains. Our attention centered on China because it is the lynchpin for the global market in this critically important foodstuff. This investigation, much of it reported at sea and on the ground in China, is unlike anything we've done before both in terms of the power of its findings and the global reach of its impact and publishing plan.

At sea, we boarded Chinese ships as part of the effort to document cases of debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, the denial of timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence on hundreds of Chinese fishing ships. 

On land, we got eyes into seafood processing plants to uncover for the first time that Uyghurs, members of one of China’s largest and most oppressed ethnic minorities, are being forcibly transferred across the country by the government to work in the seafood industry. 

Take a look: here. 

These findings have global ramifications because much of the seafood the world eats is caught by Chinese ships or processed in Chinese plants.

The crimes and concerns we unveiled are not just tied to forced labor. We also documented more than 100 Chinese found illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law, violating U.N. sanctions that prohibit foreigners fishing in North Korean waters, transmitting false locations and identities (or “spoofing”), finning of protected shark species, fishing without a license, and using prohibited fishing gear.

Perhaps the investigation’s most important accomplishment though was to connect the supply-chain dots tying these various crimes on specific Chinese ships and plants to the hundreds of restaurants and grocery stores in Europe and the US. We then assembled several tools for the public to use: one for seeing all our communications with hundreds of companies about our findings, another to search for any ship or processing plant that we studied and their associated concerns or brands. 

The reporting process was painstaking. At sea, we boarded and inspected Chinese ships in various places around the globe, including near the Galapagos Islands; near the Falkland Islands; off the Coast of Gambia; and in the Sea of Japan, near Korea. When we could not board ships, we interviewed crew by radio.

In many cases, the Chinese ships got spooked, pulling up their gear and fleeing the scene. When this happened, we trailed the ships in a smaller and faster skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice and containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, the deckhands quickly wrote their replies, often providing phone numbers for family back home, and then tossed the bottles back into the water. 

After returning to shore in foreign ports, we contacted families of the workers and interviewed several dozen additional former and current crew. The on-land portion of the project also involved tracking shipments using trade data, satellite information and direct surveillance following trucks from port to plants and culling corporate newsletters from China as well as thousands of hours of cell phone footage shot by Chinese workers to see inside factories and to identify the use of state-sponsored forced labor. 

Thanks for checking it out.