China’s Distant Water Fishing (DWF) activities has attracted growing attention from both academia and the wider policy world. The majority of the existing literature has been devoted to exploring their scale and ecological implications for host countries and coastal communities. This talk, instead, proposes focusing on the human dimension of China’s DWF, that is, the Chinese distant-water fishers without whose labour the capitalist expansion of China’s DWF across the globe would not be possible. Drawing on 5-month fieldwork in west Africa between April 2022 and January 2023, this paper seeks to explore who these Chinese distant-water fishers are, why they decided to migrate to work as distant-water fishers, and why they decided to stay with this profession despite its oft-claimed dangerous and arduous labour conditions. In response to these questions, this talk pays particular attention to how my all-male informants’ decision to take up and stay with the profession of DWF is influenced by and tied to notions of masculinity back in China.

About the Speaker

Hang (Ayo) Zhou is a political ethnographer interested in South-South relations, global China, politics of development, maritime anthropology, and everyday states in Africa. He received his Ph.D. in politics and international studies from SOAS, University of London. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the “TransOceanic Fishers” project at Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway) and the incoming assistant professor in global China at Université Laval (Canada). His recent works have appeared in African Affairs, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Marine Policy, and Revue internationals des études du développement, among others. He is a 2024 CIW Visiting Fellow.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.