You're tuned in to Roundtable.
I'm Steve today with Fei-Fei and Yushan.
Coming up, how do you revive a great river?
In the first episode of our three-part series we look at the boldest move yet on the Yangtze River a total fishing ban.
Native fish are returning, the finless porpoise is reappearing and hundreds of thousands of fishermen have started new lives on land.
Join us as we tell a story of ecological ambition and human adaptation along China's most important waterway, or at least one of them, that's for sure.
Our podcast listeners can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget that we love to hear your voice too.
So send us a voice, note our way with your thoughts on any of the things that we discuss here on the program.
Roundtablepodcast at qqcom.
Once again, roundtablepodcast at qq.com.
And now...
Welcome to the first episode of our three-part series on the changing story of the Yangtze River Economic Belt.
Over the past decade, this region has pulled off something remarkable.
Its economy has surged, even as it shifted toward a new rule of the game protect first, with no large-scale development.
Today we start with one of the boldest moves of all, the 10-year fishing ban.
Since it was fully rolled out across the river's main channels and tributaries in 2021, the river has been showing real signs of recovery.
The once-rare finless porpoise is making a comeback, and native fish species are steadily returning as well.
But this story is not just about water and wildlife, it's about people.
Five years on, more than 230000 fishermen have put down their nets and stepped into new roles, from river stewards to workers in entirely different industries, with re-employment rates close to a staggering 100.
This is one of the most important waterways in China, both historically and in modern times.
Yes, indeed.
The Yangtze River.
It rises in the mountains of Qinghai province in eastern western China excuse me then on the Shizang-Qinghai plateau, and it flows all the way to the eastern side.
That's a waterway of 6300 kilometers to reach the East China Sea at.
So, if you use, Imagine China as a giant rooster geographically.
Which, by the way, I've recently learned about.
Somebody told me that China, if you look at a map, it looks like a rooster.
And I said, really?
And I looked at a map and I said, it really does look like a rooster.
So if China looks like a rooster on the map, the Yangtze River looks like the belt that the rooster would be wearing.
Yeah, it goes directly from the central west to the central east.
So it's basically like you said, Steve, it's a belt.
And also you are right.
Historically, people along the Yangtze River, they've been making a livelihood based on the water.
And I remember in Chinese we call the southern area in China Yu Mi Zhi Xiang, as in the hometown of fish and rice.
And then the Yangtze River, it's...
It provides about half of all the fish eaten in China and two-thirds of the rice.
So that's like, in many people's idea, it's the mother river.
Well, in some other people's idea, it's the Yellow River, that's the mother river.
But for these people that live right next to it, it's their mother.
And also, I think, in ancient Chinese poems.
Many times when you see a river in that language, most of the time it means the Yangtze River.
I looked it up because I knew that historically speaking, the river was important.
And this is what I found.
Think of the Yangtze not as just a river, but as China's original superhighway and maybe its most important farm.
For thousands of years it has moved people, food and goods, connecting the remote interior to It, fed empires, inspired poets and decided the fate of conflicts.
It's the health and activity that have always been a direct measure of China's strength and stability, which is quite dramatic, but that shows the importance of this river historically and also in modern times.
Yeah.
And also that made me think of a sort of anecdote when it comes to the origin of hot pot.
You know, in the city of Chongqing, the origin of hot pot actually comes from workers working along the river.
Oh, on the docks.
Yeah, they're working on the docks.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And they start cooking whatever they have in a really hot broth.
And that's what hot pot comes from, at least on that area.
See, I've learned something already.
All right.
Well, that's a little bit of background on the river, but I wanted to do that in case any of our audience members were not really familiar.
But let's get into kind of the heart of our first episode today.
We're going to focus on the fishing ban that was put in place a few years ago.
So what was that about and why was it necessary at the time?
To understand the fishing ban, I think we first kind of need to mention also why we're talking about it now.
It's because this year 2026, marks the 10th year of the initiating or the launching of the Yangtze River Economic Belt.
So that one was launched back in 2016.
And over the past decade we've had such a long journey of both developing the smart infrastructure along the river and also ecological protection.
And on that realm, this fishing ban that began on January 1 2020.
It was the big deal that, five years on, people are still talking about it because of, or in some ways thanks to, the contribution it's done to protect the local ecology, and it was covered all the way from 2020 in 332 conservative areas and it was expanded in 2021 to a full 10-year ban and covering the river's main streams, major tributaries and large lakes like the Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake.
So this decade-long phase is actually designed to give the rivers, aquatic life, a much-needed period to rest and reproduce because, like we mentioned earlier, for thousands of years people along the river, the Yangtze River, had been relying on the river, and overfishery and pollution has caused the river to its barren minimum end, at the point when people realized that yes, we have to survive.
Start something like a fishing ban to save it.
So the amount of human activity on the river, the amount of overfishing on the river, had just pushed it to its limits.
Yes, because when you think about, you know, just banning fishing altogether on such important waterway for a period of 10 years is very, very bold.
But it's also necessary simply because, first of all, when it comes to fishery resources, The Yangtze River once accounted for over 60 of China's freshwater total, and that had started to drastically decline, I think starting in 1980s.
And over the decades, the decline just continued.
Annual wild fish catches in the Yangtze River Basin fell from over 400000 tons in 1954 to less than 100000 tons around 2020, when the ban started.
And when it comes to the ones common for major Chinese carbs, different carbs, fish that Chinese people love saw their fry number plunge from 129 billion in 1965 to just a few billion in 2021.
So fewer and fewer fishes in the river is becoming necessary to do something about it at that point.
Yeah, I mean, I guess action, it wasn't just recommended, it was absolutely necessary.
Yes, and also many species were already down to a functional extinct level, meaning that there are too few members of these various species to perform its function in the ecology, in the ecosystem.
So while others have sharply declined and everybody's worrying, there's one big question that people eventually will have to face.
That is, for the fishermen.
They are catching smaller fish year by year, and if all the fish disappear or start to show this trend of younger and smaller coming in Asian size, then How can the fishermen survive in the next 10 years if we don't do something?
So that's where this fishing ban came into place in the first place.
Also, it was to protect endangered species such as the Chinese sturgeon and the Yangtze finless porpoise.
We often call it the Yangtze River dolphin.
It's a round head, very cute looking dolphin who seems like always have a smile on his face.
I think some people call it the smiling angels as well.
I wasn't familiar with this particular dolphin. uh animal and i looked up some videos and yeah so it looks like it is a finless dolphin and it's got this perma grin on its face yes yeah it's got this permanent like this semi-happy smile on its face and it's just it's just so cute um okay so that's kind of the background but where where are we now with the fishing ban and and what have we achieved here Yeah, that's according to latest data as of 2024, 193 fish species have already been recorded.
And that's compared with 168 in early 2020, meaning that we already see tangible recovery of fish population.
And also between 2021 and 2024 monitoring teams.
They also identified a total of 344 native fish species, which was an increase of 36 species compared to the pre-ban period.
So how do you actually track the return of the fish to a river as vast as the Yangtze River?
Gao Lei, an associate researcher at the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, explains the process.
We assess fish diversity by examining species variety, abundance and size to determine whether conditions are improving.
We also track changes in fish populations, with a particular focus on whether the trend towards smaller, younger fish in the Yangtze River is easing.
Current monitoring shows that populations of the four major carps have increased to more than six times their pre-ban levels, while the number of Chinese sturgeon has surged to more than nine times its pre-ban level.
Very good.
Increased levels for the carps and for the sturgeon too.
Yeah, the Chinese sturgeon, which is very interesting, is also called the panda of the water.
Panda!
Yeah, it's basically an emblematic species of aquatic life in the Rantou River.
And I think in 1983 China banned the commercial fishing of the Chinese sturgeon because according to a lot of people it's very delicious as well.
But so that's why it banned the commercial fishing of it and listed it as a national level key protected wildlife species in 1988.
What about the finless porpoise?
What was the story there?
I'm guessing it was because the fish numbers were so depleted that the porpoise, the dolphin, didn't have anything to eat.
Exactly.
Many of those dolphins, after their corpse, show up above the water and the researchers study their corpse.
They found nothing in their stomachs, meaning that they were starved to death.
They were dying because they didn't have food.
And when my generation was very young, we were taught ever since we were kids that we need to do whatever we can to save the Yangtze River because of these spirits, these angels, smiling angels in the river, and they're dying at a very fast pace.
But recently its population has shown that now it's back on a steady upward trend, and that's according to a basin-wide survey carried out every five years along the Yangtze River that the dolphins' population reached 1249 in 2022, which is an increase of 237 compared with 2017.
That's a good news.
And, more importantly, this marked a turning point that, since comprehensive records began in the early 1990s, it was By 2022, I mean, it was the first time that the Yangtze, Finland's proper population, stopped declining and began to recover.
And that's really good news for a rare species that we were taught that's going to disappear from this earth someday in the future.
And also in recent years, we start to see a lot of photos just taken by those photography junkies that they're starting to see these dolphins jumping out of the water and just enjoying themselves.
Because, when it comes to this finless porpoise, They are very friendly to humans and they are very curious animals.
And the reason, one of the reasons, not only because of less food and, you know, worse water quality of the Yangtze River that they are dying.
And also because they're just very curious when they see a boat, when they see a seat.
Easily injured.
Yeah, they want to get close and have a look.
And often the case is that they're caught, injured or even killed by these machineries.
And that's also one of the reasons why it's very necessary to stop and reduce human activities along the river to protect these endangered animals altogether.
Now the fishermen who worked along the rivers When this ban was put into effect.
Obviously, this completely upended their lives.
So what did they do or how did they make a living following that?
What was the transition process like for them?
Yeah, many of the fishermen, they started working as a fisherman since generations ago.
They've been there for their whole life.
So to persuade them to change their career, you kind of need to give them hope and support, at least for a smooth transition first,
So back in 2021, the government channeled approximately 27 billion yuan, and that's roughly 37 billion US dollars, to support fishermen after they gave up using nets and boats on the Yangtze River.
Some local governments started even before 2021.
Since 2019 and 2020, there are already some of the counties and cities along the Yangtze River.
I remember seeing news in eastern China's Jiangsu province of how the fishermen were already advised and encouraged to submit their nets and fishery tools in exchange for subsidies and funds.
So what did they do for work afterwards, though?
What type of career did they have or what type of industry did they work in?
Some of them stayed in the aquaculture businesses by raising it from inland fishing farms.
To Some I read the news that started their own businesses afterwards and started to move around.
Some left the Yangtze River region.
Some stayed and started to go farming and grew.
Tangerine were citron trees locally, and I would assume that's in southwest China's Sichuan province where the tangerine is really popular.
But the idea was to provide them with enough resources or enough of a safety net through different social security services or financial support, or perhaps even training as well, which would be really important, because if you're going to upend someone's life and say, now you have to do something else providing training for that something else would be necessary.
But the idea would be to keep the people in the community and not force them.
I mean, displacement really is what I'm saying.
Not displace people and push them out of the community and force them to move to find work elsewhere.
Yeah.
And ever since the implementation of the fishing ban, over 230000 fishermen have received social security services and financial support, and also vocational training from the local government.
Meanwhile, 155000 fishermen with employment capacity and willingness to work along the river have already found new income sources, many of which had already achieved sort of a success, that move on to become local pillar industry instead of just focusing on fishery alone, like they used to.
And the number of reports of illegal fishing in the river also decreased by 20 in recent years.
Because you can just imagine, it's totally understandable.
In some way, I guess that these people, after first being told that they need to stop, some of them will try to.
You know, maybe fishing go, fish still go fishing in the night times.
But now, with a lot of the fishermen realizing and having this awareness of the importance of protecting the water, their hometown,
It's an expensive project, though.
Where'd the money come from?
Well, the money first of all that comes from partially from the local budgets, and also the central government will also cover another part of that.
And I think that's very interesting that these fundings for living allowances, for social securities, for job trainings, And also they are also giving subsidies for about 220000 yuan per boat per year to these fishermen.
So it definitely comes down with a mix of sometimes one-time payment like this or transitional subsidies.
The payouts would vary from place to place, I'm guessing.
Okay, so local cities and villages, they rolled out their own policies to help the fishermen through this transitional time and this transitional period.
This would be absolutely necessary to have that local support.
Yeah, and some of these former fishermen also head to the banks of the Yangtze River almost every morning.
But instead of going to fishing, they're now picking up trash and debris in the water.
They dress up in volunteer vests, as you can tell from the news reports, and carry cleaning tools and are now protecting the same river they once fed their families previously.
So former fishermen, they didn't just leave the river.
They became its protectors.
So this is Zhou Zhongliang, a former third-generation fisherman who's now part of a fish protection team in Zhejiang province in Zhenjiang, the city from Jiangsu province in eastern China.
I started fishing when I was 17 and kept going until 2019 when we were requested to stop.
The government bought our boats, nets and equipment and market value and gave us subsidies.
Now we have formed a fishery protection team in herping district.
It's a public welfare job and we went through an exam-based recruitment process.
There are nine of us.
The local authorities actively encouraged fishermen to stop fishing, reached out to understand our needs and offered support.
This has been a huge help for us.
So that means that some people have become river patrollers, some people.
It's kind of turned the area into an eco-village of sorts.
Yeah, and if you've seen the report with Mr. Joe, you can see there's a scar on his nose, actually.
He explains that he got this injury while rushing to stop illegal fishing.
Oh, really?
And there's a hook from the fish pole that kind of swung to his face and cut his nose from one time.
And yeah, that team he mentioned, the fishery protection team, was formed in 2021.
And they now operate 24-7 patrol along the river, which is such a good way to protect the river and also from the illegal fishing.
Yeah, and I think it makes perfect sense when it comes to protection of places like a large river with millions and hundreds and thousands probably of tribunaries and different waterways, very important to have the communities engaged and have their awareness.
Yes, and on board.
Yes, and also they benefit when it comes to, for example, with more sites, more reports of the fitness purpose along the river, there are travelers coming to these villages.
Oh, porpoise tourism.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's another channel where their income can come from.
And there are also when it comes to ecotourism.
A lot of these villages along the river are becoming a tourism site and can generate income.
For example, at peak times, in the Jiangxi province, they opened a fisherman's feast guesthouse.
And at peak times, the area can receive more than 5,000 visitors in a single day.
Wow, really popular.
How do we keep this going?
I mean, what they've done so far is really impressive.
But in the long run, how can they continue to prioritize ecology over industry or economic growth, or however you want to put it?
Is it easy to find a balance there?
Well, we still face a lot of challenge, that is for sure, because we said there's been 36 native fish species that's been recovered, but there are still many that's lost.
And after a decade of rest, sprawling of the four major carbs, which are the main, the leading species that's served on the Chinese table as fish dishes could rebound to 20 to 30 billion fry, about 30 of the 1960s level.
And this is estimation from the experts.
So what we kind of need to focus at this point is to keep up with what we've started.
We've already reached five years on that 10 years journey and we're hitting a relatively good beginning point.
And also in the meantime, we kind of still need to rely on these former fishermen to trust them to do a good job to stop illegal fishing.
That's, yeah, still...
Yeah, even though we mentioned, we see some of the success when it comes to recover a lot of these species.
It's just a starting point, as Yushan mentioned.
When it comes to, for example, the finless porpoise, We now have 1,200 of them in the wild.
But to put that into perspective, it's still a smaller number when compared to, for example, pandas.
We have 1,900 wild pandas now.
So this fitness purpose on some level is even rarer than pandas.
So that doesn't mean we've got success.
That means we can sit back and relax.
There's just more need to be done.
And I think also we need continuing to build stronger legal and regulatory protection for this.
For example, we have the Yangtze River protection law, we have the fishery law, we have provincial and municipal governments regulations to strengthen this ecological protection and also tackling illegal fishing.
And that just need to continue and let people be aware of.
You know, just don't go fishing, especially when it comes to large quantities.
I like the idea of the the porpoise tourism, too, because it yeah, the numbers are it's good.
They're they're rebounding, but it's still quite low in the grand scheme of things.
But the reason I say tourism is good.
People go there.
They take pictures.
They post on their socials.
It becomes more of an issue.
Public awareness becomes stronger and protecting them becomes more important of a priority for the country as a whole.
Yes.
Since 10 years ago.
The whole principle of this project is about big protection, not big development.
So the priority is clear ever since 10 years ago.
And we'll see that continue to span on in the next few years.
Just very quickly, anything else that's been done to preserve the ecology?
They've done a lot for pollution control too, right?
Yes, authorities launched what you can call a war on industrial pollution by closing moving, transforming nearly 10000 chemical enterprises along the river.
And they also regulated more than 200,000 sewage outlets to heal the river.
And they also implemented advanced monitoring and also to improve the water quality in the river.
And to that, the porpoises and the fishies say thank you.
And that will do it for today's roundtable.
Thanks very much for being with us today.
Thanks to Yushan and Feifei.
I'm Steve.
Have a good one.
And please do come back next time.
