Fishing for profits: Environment and society off the China coast, 1840--1958

This dissertation analyzes processes of environmental change in the fisheries of China's Zhoushan Archipelago, from the 1840s to the late 1950s. This local history relates to the larger issues of economic development, foreign influence, and state making in modern China, while calling attention to their environmental implications. By focusing on the marine ecosystem, moreover, this study illuminates international ecological processes that transcend the borders of the nation-state.; During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, demographic expansion and commercial integration heightened demands on Zhoushan's marine resources. Responding to these changes, fishers who migrated to Zhoushan from certain regions of Zhejiang and Fujian established unofficial territorial claims to fishing grounds and formulated rules coordinating their use. These institutions enabled regional groups to minimize the loss of profits to unrestrained competition for fishery resources, but did not limit economic pressures to intensify exploitation. Rather, social institutions enabled the commercial networks that transformed fish into commodities to function effectively. In the international context, Japan's mechanized fishing fleet began to fish waters off of Zhoushan in the 1920s after exhausting other fishing grounds in the East China Sea. Domestic and international pressures combined to weaken arrangements coordinating the use of Zhoushan's fisheries, leading to contests for the control of a declining body of resources.; From the early twentieth century into the late 1950s, Chinese fishery experts who staffed state management agencies held that science and technology could manipulate finite resources for maximum production and fiscal income, while also preventing depletion. This assumption reflected a project of modernity pursued in China as well as in countries throughout the twentieth-century world. In Zhoushan's fisheries, plans to rationalize exploitation of resources accompanied initiatives to strengthen bureaucratic control and facilitate extraction of revenues. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese state's effort to regulate and tax Zhoushan's fisheries through multiple, competing administrative agencies led to intense inter-bureaucratic conflict. When finally put into practice in the 1950s, fishery development plans maximized short-term economic production and fiscal returns but sacrificed long-term environmental sustainability, contributing to the collapse of Zhoushan's prime fish species.