China on the High Seas: A Conversation With Ian Urbina

By Safina Center Writer-in-Residence Paul Greenberg

A Chinese industrial squid boat. ©The Outlaw Ocean.

Safina Center Fellow alum Ian Urbina has been covering what might be the most mysterious and dangerous place in the world for nearly a decade now. I’m speaking of that vast swath of ocean that lies in between the territorial control of individual nations. These distant waters, usually referred to as “The High Seas,” are far from empty. Not only do they teem with marine life, they are also the setting for all kinds of criminal activity that range from slavery to oil dumping to unsanctioned whaling to Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU). Ian first started to lift the lid off this last frontier in a series for the New York Times called “The Outlaw Ocean.” He would go on to write a book and found a nonprofit with the Outlaw Ocean name. Ian and The Outlaw Ocean Project just keep going and going, growing ever more ambitious in their reporting. This month, The New Yorker published his latest investigation—a deep, troubling look at China’s offshore fishing fleet. It was an issue I always knew was huge but one I never personally felt ready to tackle. Ian and his team have tackled it and I was happy to catch up with him this week and see how this miraculous piece of reporting came together. What follows is a slightly edited conversation we had on October 21st.

Paul Greenberg: To begin with, I just want to say congratulations on a really well researched and difficult article.

Ian Urbina: Thanks.

PG: How long did it take to do all this?

IU: A little over four years.

PG: Did you realize what you were getting into when you started? Did you think it would take four years?

IU: I didn’t realize it would take four years but I knew it would be a doozy because things are so impenetrable when it comes to China. The investigation, as you know, had two distinct parts: Crimes on Land and Crimes at Sea. The on-land investigation of forced labor in Chinese processing plants and the connecting of the supply chain dots from problematic ships to plants using forced labor all the way to global brands is what took so long. Getting onto the Chinese ships themselves at sea to talk to workers also is what took a lot of time and effort.

“We threw messages in bottles at the crews and then they wrote their replies and threw bottled messages back”

PG: I can imagine. Also, this was The New Yorker, which I know is really thorough on factchecking and verification. Did that add an additional layer of difficulty?

IU: Yes and no. We have worked with the New Yorker for the past three years and published a bunch with them. So all the investigations we do, we build a fact check footnoted version of the reporting as we go so that if we end up wanting to publish it with the New Yorker we will be ready. But if we end up wanting to publish it elsewhere, we will have that level of rigor and internal checks just the same.

PG: Got it. OK so let’s step back and look at the massive entirety of what you uncovered. Just a massive fleet of Chinese ships fishing, often illegally. Catching over 5 billion pounds of seafood annually. What kind of damage is all this fishing to doing the ocean? Is it even calculable on a global scale or are the effects best conveyed on a local scale?

IU: Honestly, our focus was less on measuring the impacts, which clearly are great. So, I’d be hard pressed to speculate. Our goal was to focus on the depth and diversity and severity of criminality in the fleet. A big portion of that focus was ships engaged in IUU, often incursions into other countries’ waters. Documenting what ships did that and where. The heftier portion of the reporting though was looking at the abuse happening on the ships to crew. Then the forced labor in processing plants on land. Then the complicity by downstream buyers globally. The findings are well summarized here.

PG: Right. Now, the story of forced labor aboard international fishing fleets is something you’ve looked into before, particularly in your Outlaw Ocean series for the New York Times and in book form. Was the difference here that you really were drilling down on the Chinese example? What surprised you or felt new to you about this particular story?

IU: Yeah, the focus on the Chinese was new and the justification to look specifically [at them] was that they have by far the biggest distant-water fleet, which is partly why they are the undisputed Superpower of Seafood. The other reason they are really the lynchpin of the global seafood market is their processing infrastructure. As for what surprised me most: how extensive the Xinjiang/Uyghur and North Korean forced labor problem taints the market, which is to say how many plants we found with this problem and how many global companies are receiving seafood with this particular connection to forced labor (to say nothing of their ties to hundreds of vessels also connected to IUU and forced labor at sea).

PG: That blew me away too. You mentioned earlier the impenetrable nature of reporting on these issues in and around China. I don’t want you to betray any sources but how did you penetrate? Are foreign reporters in general being a little too shy about China?

IU: This video sort of shows and explains it. But the at-sea was a process of visiting four areas on the ocean and talking our way on board, or talking with them by radio bridge to bridge, or communicating with crew by throwing messages in bottles at them and then they wrote their replies and threw bottled messages back.

PG: Amazing

IU: The on-land portion of getting eyes into the plants involved my team mining thousands of hours of open-source video footage, typically cell phone selfie type videos on the Chinese equivalent of TikTok plus combing company newsletters and state media plus hiring investigators in China to follow trucks or film plants. The methodology page walks through a fuller rendering of how we did the OSI (open-source intel) stuff.

PG: It surprised me that you can hire private investigators in China but I suppose I’m naive. Was there a kind of Chinese Private Eye type? Is there a detective series in this? I jest a little but, well, you know . . .

IU: I doubt I will say much about who we worked with in China. But yes, there are lots of ways to get things done and we never had anyone break any laws in the process of their surveillance. That much I can say. More than that I tend to keep it sparse because these folks there could face serious risk if I tipped my or their hand. Typically, the investigators we used were simply trying to get us visual confirmation of the movement of catch from port to plant.

PG: I guess we’ll have to wait until the Humphrey Bogart of China steps forward to play one of these unseen people in fictional form. Moving on. I think when you cover ocean issues (or really any one set of issues) for any length of time, reporter fatigue starts to set in. But you’ve really kept at this one. I think your first Outlaw Ocean piece in the Times came out in 2015. But you’re still at it. What keeps you on this beat?

IU: The stories are so diverse so it doesn’t really feel like one thing. The last investigation we did for the New Yorker was about abuse of migrants at sea and on land in Libya. Pretty distinct from this one in China. So, yes, it is sort of a beat. But it’s a huge area geographically (2/3 planet) and topically (repo, abortion, IUU fishing, oil dumping, sea slavery, arms trafficking, murder, illegal whaling, stowaways, migrant abuse, Uyghurs, sea and land…you get the picture).

PG: Yes. But it’s also a range of issues that often puts you in harm’s way. Do you worry about that personally or on behalf of your team?

IU: The at-sea reporting is really the part that can get a bit thorny and yes this is of course a big consideration. You see what happened in Libya. But the bulk of my team is land-based. They are investigators but they don’t do field reporting. I tend to travel with small team at sea. That said, yeah, sure, it is sometimes risky but I always hasten to point out how much more dangerous all of this is for the people I cover: I get to leave and go home, they have to stay on the ships or whatever dark corner I’m investigating them in and they don’t have the luxury I do of (usually) leaving at will.

PG: True. For the much more timid person who doesn’t report on these issues or put themselves at risk for the sake of the truth, I think most people just want to know that when they live their lives, go to the supermarket, shop, eat, etc. that they are not causing harm. And there are all sorts of certification schemes to reassure us that we are doing the right thing when we shop. But reading your piece and seeing how stealthily so much of the seafood we eat is moved around to hide its real identity I felt a real despair. Is there any way to truly know that we haven’t implicated ourselves in terrible crimes when we eat from the sea?

IU: There are indeed real concerns with the audit regimes and certification programs like Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Monterrey Bay Aquarium type cards. One of the biggest issues with them is they do not actually attempt to consider labor issues on the vessels. They focus almost exclusively on marine issues and even their focus on those concerns is fraught with problems. We tried to engage these entities during the reporting and on our Discussion Page where we posted every conversation we have with over 300 companies and such firms, we got very very little cooperation from them regarding ways they might consider improving. You might look at, for instance, our exchanges with MSC.

PG: Interesting.

IU: It’s not all gloom and doom and some smart stakeholders have posed smart ideas (that we are updating all the time). Here is where you can see lots of possible fixes.

PG: And now that this great piece of reporting is out there, circulating in the world, have you gotten any push back or reaction from the key players, particularly those in China? Has the article been translated into local languages and is it being read in China?

IU: Yeah, the reporting (it’s a series of articles rather than one) is running in 3 dozen countries and twelve languages including Japanese, Chinese, Uyghur, Korean. And yes, it has found its way into China. And yes, there has been some pushback from the Chinese government which has said the stories are “fabricated,” to use their wording. A survey of reactions—negative and positive—is tracked on the Impact page.

PG: Excellent. All of these resources you’re linking to just make this so much bigger than what we usually think of as “an article.” The graphics package is terrific as well. When I did the reporting for my book American Catch, about the fact that the overwhelming majority of our seafood is coming from abroad, I always felt there was a giant black box out there that I wasn’t opening. So I have to say, really, thank you for opening it.

IU: Well, and Paul this is hollow flattery: you and I both know how much I turn to you for input, research help, guidance. And how closely I’ve read what you have written over the years, including your amazing piece from way back when in the LA Times about squid. My point is that, I stand on the shoulders of folks like you to be able to do this reporting. So, thanks, back at you.

PG: Well, digital blush on my end. Thank you Ian for this really enlightening exchange. Speaking of hollow things one can say in the post COVID era: “stay safe.” When people say that to me on the street, I often think, save that for Ian Urbina. But anyway, be well, stay safe, and keep opening that box.

IU: Ha! Keep taking my calls and we can keep cracking open these stories.

PG: Deal. Thanks.

I encourage you to follow Ian’s work at www.theoutlawocean.org. And for non-English speakers, different versions of Outlaw Ocean’s reporting are available in Cantonese and Uyghur as well as in Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.