Chinese Marine Capture Fisheries

This contribution reviews the development of Chinese marine fisheries and fleet structure since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (‘China,’ excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) in 1949, up to the present, with emphasis on the type and quality of underlying statistical information, especially on landings. Our main purpose is to provide a basis for evaluating the credibility of reported nominal catches, with particular emphasis on total marine landing increases from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, and thereby to complement the analysis of spatially disaggregated Chinese fisheries catch statistics presented by R. Watson in Part II of this volume.