China's Statistics Are Fishier Than Its Oceans.(Brief Article)

The hundred or so boats anchored in a fishing port of Penglai in China's Shandong province have seen better days. Their blue paint is chipped, their equipment rusty. A handful of fishermen brave the stiff January breeze to get the boats in shape for the opening of the fishing season in March. This year they are steeling themselves for disappointment. In recent years it's been getting harder and harder to find enough fish. Many boats venture far out into international waters, bigger ones sometimes going as far as Indonesia and the South Pacific, fishermen say. "There are too many boats and too few resources," says a fisherman who goes by Chen. "It's difficult to make money."

This grim testimony doesn't square with the happy story the People's Republic of China has been telling the world for more than a decade. Each year since 1988, Chinese officials have reported a steady rise in the number of fish caught off China's shores, even as fish stocks almost everywhere else have declined. Last year, according to China Daily, an official newspaper, fishermen caught a record 41 million tons of fish. Since China accounts for such a large proportion of the world's catch (about three in every 10 fish are caught off its shores), this robust output has more than compensated for the paltry showing elsewhere. In recent years China's rising catch has outstripped the combined decline of every other country in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

But now, it turns out, China's numbers were too good to be true. A study recently published in the scientific journal Nature has set the U.N. numbers on their head. China's stocks have not been increasing by an average annual rate of 330,000 tons a year, write Reg Watson and Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia. In fact, they've actually been falling by 360,000 tons annually. Jane Lubcenco, a professor of zoology at the University of Oregon who reviewed the paper, called the findings "earthshaking." "The global state of the oceans is a lot more serious than we have been led to believe," said Lubcenco. "We have been overfishing to a much greater extent than previously thought."

The inflated numbers seem to have been spawned by antiquated communist data-collection methods, according to Watson and Pauly. Each year in China, local officials are asked to report their catches to Beijing-- knowing full well their promotions depend on good news. Local officials passed inflated numbers to Beijing officials, who simply added them up without validating them, and sent them along to the United Nations. They must have begun to suspect that the overall numbers were too rosy, because in 1999 Beijing declared a temporary "zero growth" policy on its fishing statistics. For three years running it has reported the same tonnage of catches to the United Nations.

Publicly, Chinese officials deny that their numbers were inflated. Yang Jian, director-general ...