Evolution of distant water fisheries policies in China: Overview, characteristics and proposals

Abstract

Distant water fisheries policy is an important management tool to regulate the development of distant water fisheries of China. This paper aims to describe the changing focus of distant water fisheries policies by analyzing their development over 30 years. In this paper, the policy of China's distant water fisheries since 1985 was studied by means of word frequency and social network analyses. According to the time sequence of policy promulgation, the period is divided into four chronological stages: supervision and management, industrial structure optimization, in-depth exploration of international resources and key transformation. Correspondingly, the development of China's distant water fisheries policies is analyzed, including the formation of more comprehensive management policies, increased diversification of policy participants, increased prominence of technology and shift to cooperative exploration of fishery resources. This paper summarized the problems the policies still face, including lack of more effective prevention measures and emergency response measures for foreign-related fishing vessel incidents, limited policy participants, not in sync with international rules and fewer types of policy tools. Therefore, in order to promote the development of distant water fisheries and ensure biological sustainability, it is important to fully consider and implement improved supervision and management policies, public participation, relevant international rules and policy tools reflecting biologically sustainable resource utilization in the future.