Category Archives: Gray Zone

Gray Zone

A Surfacing Strategy: Chinese Unconventional Oceanic Warfare

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By Jack Lindstrom

The evolution of maritime warfare has largely moved in expanding the form of conflict and the direction of it. Originating from largely surface conflict and eventually amphibious assaults, maritime conflict shifted to expanded domains, attacks from below by submarines and above by aircraft carriers. However, in the continued evolution of maritime conflict since World War II, various new technologies and strategies have shifted the way war is conducted, as well as preparations for war. This is reflected most clearly in the case of China and Chinese maritime expansion. Although it began and evolved by replicating traditional naval strategy, adopted from Soviet Union systems and adapted for Chinese needs and limitations, it has since evolved dramatically to employ a vast array of unconventional methods.

This article will analyze these unconventional methods, focusing centrally on China’s evolving systems and strategies, while also drawing parallels to other unconventional strategies of other nations. That said, this article is centrally focused on Chinese maritime strategy evolution and its ramifications. These tools, by examining an undercurrent of strategy applied to different facets of the undersea domain, establish an argument on Beijing’s military-civil infrastructure, through research vessels, cargo fleets, fishing boats, and autonomous drones. In such a way, this infrastructure operates without acting as a clear and present threat or exigency for war; rather, it functions simply as an inconvenience or mild concern, one which becomes increasingly threatening, despite not acting as an obviously military entity. The article is in turn divided into key sections, focused on military-civil fusion, submarine strategies, the role of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and anchor dragging.

The underwater domain has seen a disproportionate advancement in large part due to its modern nature. Submarines are highly technical weapons of war, and as a result, see the most significant growth and unconventional adaptations. China’s newest submarine, the Type 095, is also referred to as a sail-less submarine because of its unique proportions, designed to be swifter and stealthier. These are, in fact, two separate hulls under parallel development rather than a single design: satellite imagery placed the Type 095 fitting out at the Bohai shipyard in Huludao in February 2026, sporting a conventional sail and a distinctive X-form rudder, while a separate, still-unnamed vessel of roughly 120 meters surfaced independently at Jiangnan Shipyard near Shanghai that June, evidence Beijing is now running simultaneous next-generation attack-submarine programs across at least two yards. By reducing noise, it is able to better avoid acoustic detection systems, such as those employed by the U.S. and Japan’s ‘Fish Hook’ detection system, specifically surrounding the First Island Chain.

This development has followed a striking increase in Chinese submarine production, including a 2+1 production of nuclear attack submarines per year. The undersea domain is not limited to submarines specifically; however, for example, the mapping and data collection of the ocean floor work to enable submarine piloting. His data has been gathered throughout the Indo-Pacific region as well as the Arctic, through military-civil fusion doctrine, established by Xi Jinping as a national strategy, and has seen systematic incorporation. UUVs in particular have been deployed by Chinese vessels to map the seafloor, under the International Seabed Authority’s designation; however, these UUVs were found to spend only about 6% of their time in these designated zones. Additionally, a majority of these vessels were found to be tied to state companies and were reported to have conducted suspicious activity. Such activity includes mapping undersea cable networks, potentially for sabotage purposes, as well as UUV data collection near the U.S. Pacific Submarine Fleet’s homeport in Guam.

This data collected under a scientific and civil guise has been reported to have been communicated with Chinese state systems such as the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Such data gathering under a civilian guise has been reflected in other reports, such as Chinese shipping systems, as recently as September 2026, wherein COSCO was accused of surveillance while transporting cargo. While the COSCO case has been denied publicly, the expansion of Chinese trade in the Arctic draws attention to such possibilities of espionage undertaken through trade, the very same trade which is expanding uniquely and without competition into the Arctic. These Arctic expeditions were preceded by years of icebreaker data recording. Such icebreakers are utilized with the technology required to map the saefloor and collect data to enable submarine piloting in the region. Buoys have been deployed with recording infrastructure to collect data in the Arctic, which has raised concern among Canadian officials.

Anchor dragging serves as a form of deep-sea sabotage unique to Russia and China, corresponding with seabed mapping. The maps of the seafloor enable a surgical strike specifically on undersea communications cables, such as those conducted in the Baltic and Taiwan. Anchor dragging and GUGI operations are unique because they specifically create kinetic conflict between nations with plausible deniability, and thereby not sparking any wars, while still acting in offensive operations.

There is also the case of shadow fleets to skirt sanctions, trade route chokepoints, Chinese sponsorship of pirates, fisherman harassment, the Batanes issues, so forth. The tools utilized by China rest not within traditional means of war but instead flow into a system of gray-zone maritime strategy adopted by Russia and China alike, to avoid open war. Through habituation, the subtle encroachment of Chinese vessels in waters around Taiwan, the Batans, and Alaska has slowly become accepted; Chinese actions, while never outright tolerated, have become increasingly accepted.

Russia’s shadow fleet illustrates such a case: after sanctions barred Russia’s traditional shipping fleets, the nation utilized other commercial ships for strategic ends. The assembled fleet is roughly 400 to 600 aging tankers, a range CSIS has independently tracked, which continue to transport the majority of Russia’s seaborne crude outside the reach of Western price caps, insurance regimes, and, of course, sanctions. These vessels sail under the guise of different nations, through shell-company ownership, and often without identification transponders- something paralleled in China’s expansion in the Arctic. China has also employed vessels without “functioning” transponders to deliver goods to the Arctic LNG 2, and reiterates the notion of commercial shipping as strategy.

The Shadow Fleet, as it’s come to be known, serves as an economic lifeline for the Kremlin as well as a weapon of war with no clear national association.  The Eagle S. is a tanker flagged under the Cook Islands and linked to the shadow fleet; however, it was seized by Finnish authorities after dragging its anchor for 66 miles across the Gulf of Finland in December of 2024. This anchor dragging severed the Estlink 2 power cable as well as a number of telecommunications cables; another merchant vessel under the Hong Kong flag served the Baltic connector gas pipeline in October 2023. The Chinese-owned Yi Peng 3 also severed cables between Sweden and Lithuania in November 2024, dragging an anchor for nearly 300 kilometers. CBS News’s 60 Minutes has documented this Eagle S-Balticconnector-Yi Peng 3 sequence in detail, tracing each vessel’s anchor-drag track via satellite data. Russia retains a Main Directorate of Underwater Research, an operational force tied to a variety of undersea sabotage operations and missions, such as anchor dragging. Known by the Russian acronym GUGI, the directorate answers directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense, as opposed to participating in the Navy chain of command, as well as operating a vessel, the Yantar, equipped with submersibles capable of reaching the depths of undersea cables.

Western defense officials have tracked the Yantar loitering over transatlantic cable junctions from Ireland to the Baltic, per UK Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy monitoring reports, noting that the submersible remote-controlled vehicles are explicitly capable of tapping cables for intelligence, as well as laying explosives upon them for future sabotage. GUGI’s vessels deliberately survey and manipulate the seabed without an incident of any deliberate attack, under the guise of research and science, thus insulating any actions from sparking conflict. In other words, Russia’s strategy of a shadow fleet and research vessels conducting operations is an adoption of an existing Chinese strategy of military-civil fusion.

China’s undersea cable incidents work in tandem with the Russian operations- in 2025, a Togo-flagged vessel, the Hong Tai 58, crewed by Chinese personnel, loitered near the Taiwan-Penghu No. 3 cable, before releasing its anchor and serving the aforementioned cable. Taiwanese authorities detained the vessel and its captain in the aftermath of the incident. January of the same year saw a Cameroon-marked vessel, the Shunxin39, cut a cable near Keelung after loitering nearby, which Taiwan’s coast guard confirmed to be Chinese-owned despite its flag of convenience. Operations that rest just below the threshold to spark conflict, but work to erode and sabotage Western systems, degrading Western influence, power and regional capability.

China has employed commercial ships for espionage operations as well, with a Reuters 2026 report claiming that COSCO, the state-owned Chinese shipping conglomerate, has operated signals-intelligence equipment aboard its vessels, and thus collected military communications around the U.S., Europe, and throughout Asia, which U.S. officials confirmed to Reuters on the condition of anonymity. Correspondingly, the Pentagon had previously added COSCO to a list of companies linked to the Chinese military in January of 2025, per the Department of Defense’s Section 1260H designation,- the same year a U.S. Naval War College report concluded the PLA was utilizing China’s commercial fleets for intelligence. The Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute detailed the fishing fleet’s intelligence role specifically, identifying trained specialists embedded within militia crews. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law (Article 7, per China Law Translate’s official English translation) obliges Chinese state firms to assist state intelligence work when asked, in part fueling military-civil fusion doctrine, and providing Beijing with endless strategic assets for use across the world.

China’s maritime militia operates in the South China Sea to project state power through civilian forces; it is power projection through influence that is present, if in a non-evidently violently. The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia act as civilian operators under governmental action, and utilize civilian boats, based primarily out of Hainan, which harass rival claimants and foreign naval vessels. As such, Beijing is not acting as a provocative, aggressive nation, but rather a nation that utilizes proxy forces, without sparking conflict.

Philippine officials have documented repeated incidents in which Chinese Coast Guard vessels, side by side with maritime militia boats, weaponized water cannons against Filipino fishing boats near Scarborough Shoal in December of 2025. The Philippines’ Batanes Islands have also seen increased Chinese aggression through diplomatic actions, as well as the Armed Forces of the Philippines has tracked a persistent presence of Chinese research vessels working around the Bashi Channel, akin to the Chinese UUV operations near Guam. UUVs, are alone, outside of their data collection, act as novel weapons of war- seen through AUVs and remote-controlled UUVs, or gliders. These systems include the AJX002, an extra-large UUV or XLUUV, which was synthesized for the strategic purposes of minelaying, particularly in and around the First Island Chain. The undersea drones that were functioning primarily for surveillance have been designed for military and destructive purposes.  The AJX002 has been paired with the HSU100, a reconnaissance variant of an XLUUV fitted with retractable masts, to turn the vessel into a glider design from an AUV, for long-range intelligence-gathering expeditions. Beijing has also experimented with at least five XLUUV designs; several are capable of ferrying torpedoes and mines across the ocean. These play a kinetic role in the prior wall of intelligence that detected submarines and underwater actions through the Underwater Great Wall, a network of seabed sensors, now utilizing long-range gliders, autonomous UUVs, and newly defended by military UUVs. The civilian seabed-mapping campaign using UUVs aforementioned only strengthens this notion of military-civil fusion, particularly utilized by UUVs and enabled by AI technology.

Additionally, this minelaying strategy, if deployed by a “research” expedition around Taiwan, would lead to a critical blockade crucial to overtaking the island nation. Should these mines be planted weeks or months in advance around chokepoints or ports, or planted subtly by UUVs, China would hold a keen advantage in the waters around the strait and island. While the captains of vessels can be detained and prosecuted, uncrewed drones, if unflagged or operating under a guise, such legal action cannot be successfully prosecuted.

Overall, the strategies of submarines, anchor-dragging, sanctions-evading, maritime militias, and autonomous underwater drones create an overarching image of Chinese unconventional means of warfare. While each act and method is uniquely deniable and non-escalatory by design, the culmination of each method of power projection creates a strong Chinese presence in the Indo-Pacific and Arctic regions, without a single warship present. Tankers with drag anchors across critical cables fly under false flags, while research vessels operate with designated permits, and a system of undersea infrastructure designed for submarine enabling and detection alike. Each development in this system of maritime power projection builds upon a structure that has already, evidently, been established. In such a way, the slow and subtle habituation to Chinese operations in the world’s oceans, through a civilian cover with military means, establishes a status quo wherein Chinese operations are capable from the Baltic to the Bashi Channel.

Western and allied responses have been primarily reactive, at the time of writing. NATO’s Baltic Sentry was launched in January 2025 to better patrol the undersea infrastructure in the Baltic, in large part a response to the Russian cable-cutting. However, there is no standing international posture to counter gray-zone maritime activity as a unified strategy, as it appears to be. Such an asymmetry of action- the limited responses of the West compared to wide options for Chinese engagement- is a critical design of the unconventional strategy. As Beijing’s own investment shifts from crewed research vessels toward uncrewed platforms like the AJX002, the political cost of coercion will only continue to fall, and the window for building deterrence around attribution, rather than around the presence of a detainable crew, is closing.

Jack Lindstrom is a graduate researcher from the University of California, San Diego, pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs. He is also a junior researcher for the Mackinder Forum, where he conducts research on great power strategy and historical shifts of international competition.

Featured image: The BRP Cabra of the Philippine Coast Guard and two vessels of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources approaches Chinese-flagged ships at Whitsun Reef (known as Julian Felipe Reef in the Philippines) during maritime patrol operations. (Wikimedia Commons)

Gray Zone

Russia’s Irregular Maritime Statecraft in the Baltic Sea

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By Joe Durigan and Craig Whiteside

Since 2022, Russia has sharply increased its employment of illegal/coercive/aggressive/deceptive (ICAD) maritime tactics in the Baltic Sea, often loosely referred to as “gray zone” activities. Assessing Russian hostility toward Europe, new NATO chief Mark Rutte recently noted that “Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies” and that the alliance must be prepared for a Russian attack within five years. Whether Rutte’s assessment is correct is hard to judge, but could the dramatic increase in ICAD maritime tactics be the cause for this perception? Is Russian aggression imminent in the Baltic Sea region?

Our analysis of Russian illicit maritime tactics in the Baltic Sea since 2022 leaves us skeptical of any escalation. We argue that Russia employs irregular maritime statecraft to offset declining conventional naval power, sustain sanctioned energy exports, and pressure NATO without triggering open conflict. These nefarious activities—shadow fleet operations, undersea infrastructure sabotage, and electronic interference—are disruptive but strategically limited. While effective at harassment and signaling, they cannot deliver decisive political outcomes and increasingly risk attribution, backlash, and escalation. Putting aside Russia’s robust capabilities and malign behavior in other domains, its maritime “gray zone campaign” is a defensive, compensatory strategy chosen out of weakness, not a pathway to strategic advantage. NATO’s real challenge is managing persistent disruption without over or under-reacting—the strategic analog to the Goldilocks rule.

Russian Maritime Strategic Culture and its bad hand in the Baltic Sea

Russia’s maritime behavior in the Baltic Sea is best understood through the constraints imposed by strategic culture and geography rather than through explanations of deliberate escalation or doctrinal mastery. Historically a land‑centric power, Russia has struggled to convert naval forces into reliable political leverage, particularly in confined maritime spaces. Unlike its confidence in ground operations or information warfare, Moscow has long treated the sea as an exposed domain—one where visibility is high, control is fleeting, and conventional superiority is difficult to sustain. As a result, Russia has tended to favor ambiguity, deception, and indirect methods at sea over overt demonstrations of naval power.

That discomfort has become more pronounced since 2022. Russia’s inability to move naval forces through the Turkish Straits, its lack of reliable sea lines of communication, and a shipbuilding sector that cannot replace aging vessels—combined with the Kremlin’s persistent relegation of the maritime domain to the bottom of its strategic priorities—have all contributed to this increasingly apparent weakness. These factors, combined with NATO’s expansion to include Finland and Sweden, have transformed the Baltic from a contested maritime space into one that is effectively NATO‑enclosed. At the same time, Russia’s growing dependence on seaborne energy exports has raised the strategic importance of uninterrupted maritime access through a region where its freedom of action is sharply constrained. Moscow thus faces a paradox: it must preserve the Baltic as an economic lifeline while lacking the conventional forces needed to dominate or defend it.

In response, Russia has not developed a sophisticated maritime gray zone doctrine so much as defaulted to familiar tools often employed when power projection is risky and escalation control matters. The use of civilian vessels, deniable electronic interference, and legally ambiguous undersea activity reflects adaptation under pressure rather than confidence or strategic ambition. These methods enable harassment, signaling, and limited disruption while avoiding open confrontation, but they are poorly suited to producing durable political outcomes. Russia’s irregular maritime statecraft in the Baltic is therefore best understood as a holding action—an effort to manage decline and preserve room for maneuver from a constrained strategic position, rather than a pathway to maritime advantage.

Russia’s Three-page Playbook of Maritime Irregular Statecraft

Russia’s maritime irregular statecraft in the Baltic Sea relies on a narrow, repeatable playbook optimized for deniability and persistence rather than control or coercive leverage. Far from demonstrating doctrinal sophistication, this approach reflects the limited options available to a constrained actor operating in a NATO dominated maritime environment. At its core are three mutually reinforcing tools: the shadow fleet as both economic lifeline and operational cover, selective disruption of undersea infrastructure to exploit political sensitivity and attribution delays, and low-cost electronic interference to degrade the maritime picture in the Baltic. Together, these tactics enable harassment and signaling below the threshold of armed conflict while minimizing immediate escalation risks—but they do not scale into durable strategic advantage.

The shadow fleet sits at the center of this playbook. Economically, these vessels are indispensable to sustaining Russia’s war effort by moving sanctioned energy exports through the Baltic. Operationally, they offer deniable platforms that exploit legal ambiguities, mask movements, and complicate enforcement. Yet this dual use is inherently self-limiting. The same ships Russia depends on for revenue are increasingly visible, tracked, and exposed to interdiction, legal action, and seizure. Aggressive employment of the shadow fleet for coercive purposes therefore risks undermining the very economic lifeline it is meant to protect. As a result, the fleet functions less as a tool of escalation than as a constraint on how far Russia can push its maritime campaign.

Undersea infrastructure disruption and electronic warfare act as force multipliers within this constrained approach, but they exhibit clear diminishing returns. Pipelines, power cables, and fiberoptic links are attractive targets primarily because they are exposed and politically sensitive components of energy systems and lines of communication, not because they provide decisive leverage. Damage is typically repairable, escalation tends to remain bounded, and repetition of these tactics steadily generates political backlash alongside improved monitoring and faster attribution. Electronic interference—particularly ship based Global Positioning System (GPS) and Automatic Identification System (AIS) jamming—reinforces these dynamics at low cost by degrading maritime safety and complicating enforcement in congested waters, yet such effects are fleeting and increasingly detectable. Over time, the operational signatures that these activities leave behind erode deniability rather than preserve it.

Taken together, this narrow and self-limiting playbook enables disruption without control and visibility without leverage—a strategy of management rather than momentum that raises a more fundamental question: whether Russia’s maritime gray zone campaign represents a durable form of competition with options for escalation or the early signs of strategic exhaustion.

Whither the “Gray Zone”?

Three years into Russia’s irregular maritime campaign, its strategic gains are limited and diminishing as they invite stronger legal and political backlash. These tactics do not scale well into operational advantages, and work better when maritime conventional forces can back them up. The best example of this is the Chinese navy’s support for its Coast Guard and Maritime Militia harassment of neighboring fishing vessels in East and South China Seas. Russia’s maritime capabilities are too weak to integrate power in this fashion. The backlash in Europe is producing a balancing effect, as efforts to improve attribution and legal charges against perpetrators limit Russian efforts. NATO states have boarded suspicious vessels, seized vessels involved in sabotage (e.g. MV FITBURG), and increased maritime domain awareness to identify and document future attacks. ICAD tactics are best suited for harassment, signaling, and economic necessity; they are poor tools for reversing Russia’s strategic woes.

Advocates of the gray zone concept a decade ago predicted it would eventually become the prevalent method of undermining the status quo and be difficult to combat. This does not make it an inherently low-risk strategy. The accumulation of ICAD events and the attention given to them in the post-Ukraine invasion era make it impossible for Russian acts to fly “below the radar.” Instead, the very escalation that these tactics seek to avoid becomes more likely as states react to the constant drumbeat of malign behavior.

How should NATO leverage the growing visibility of irregular maritime tactics and the certainty that Russia is behind them? First, accelerate efforts to determine attribution and expose these tactics immediately in a coordinated fashion with NATO partners. Increased maritime domain awareness at all levels is a priority; this includes investing in seabed monitoring, AIS/Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) analytics, and forensic investigation capacity. Rapid and credible attribution enables legal action, sanctions, interdiction, and future deterrence by exposure.

Secondly, NATO should transition from passive monitoring of Russia’s “shadow fleet” to a posture of active maritime containment. Under NATO’s 2025 Alliance Maritime Strategy (AMS) to uphold freedom of navigation and secure strategic trade routes, NATO should no longer treat these vessels as mere commercial anomalies. Instead, the Alliance should designate uninsured or AIS-spoofing vessels as “Navigational and Environmental Hazards,” providing the legal predicate for mandatory boardings and inspections within territorial and contiguous waters. By continuing to work towards active maritime containment, NATO can normalize interdictions that raise the insurance premiums and operational costs for Moscow’s economic lifelines, transforming its primary source of revenue into a point of strategic vulnerability.

Thirdly, NATO should operationalize its “Digital Ocean Vision” to secure critical undersea infrastructure. The defensive posture of the past three years—characterized by slow attribution and repair—is obsolete. Following the framework of Operation Baltic Sentry, NATO should scale Task Force X to deploy a persistent, autonomous undersea maritime infrastructure resiliency initiative. By integrating uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) with high-resolution acoustic sensors, NATO can create a real-time “networked ocean” that detects anomalies—such as the 2024 Motor Vessel Eagle S incident—as they occur. This capability moves NATO from a “forensic” response to a “preventative” one, utilizing automated interceptors to escort suspicious vessels away from critical nodes before damage is sustained.

Finally, NATO should institutionalize friction-as-deterrence by centralizing command authority and multi-domain surveillance within MARCOM. Russia’s irregular tactics thrive on the organizational seams between the Baltic and Arctic theaters; closing these gaps requires resourcing MARCOM to function as the singular operational hub for the Northern Flank. Under the 2025 Alliance Maritime Strategy, MARCOM should be empowered to fuse its recognized maritime picture with real-time data from the NATO Commercial Space Strategy and “Digital Ocean” uncrewed sensors, allowing the Alliance to immediately out-signal Russian electronic interference and GPS jamming. By utilizing high-intensity exercises like Freezing Winds 2025 to wargame integrated, rapid-response ICAD counter-tactics, NATO ensures that every Russian hybrid act is met with an immediate, pre-authorized operational pushback. This centralized posture shifts the burden of escalation back to the Kremlin, forcing Moscow to choose between a conventional naval confrontation it cannot win or a strategic retreat from a monitored and controlled maritime gray zone.

This is already happening in Hong Kong of all places, where Finland has pressured China to detain and prosecute civilian ship Captain Wan Wnguo, accused of dragging one of the ship’s anchors across several underwater cables in 2023 and causing $41 million in damage. Ironically, the ship had just completed the first run from China to Kaliningrad along the Northern Sea Route, a potent symbol of Russian and Chinese cooperation. China has cooperated with Finland to date, and the trial is set for this month.

Conclusion

Russia’s expansion of maritime irregular statecraft in the Baltic Sea Region is a compensatory strategy born of weakness, not strength. As Russia’s conventional naval power has eroded, accelerated by maritime losses in the Black Sea and NATO’s expansion, Moscow has turned to deniable, low-cost, maritime subversion to protect its economic lifelines, pressure NATO, and shape escalation dynamics without triggering open war.

Russia’s activities in the Baltic are best understood as a holding action by a constrained power. It enables disruption and delay but not control. These ICAD tactics at sea might provoke below thresholds of war, but they say more about managing decline, protecting lifelines, and shaping escalation in a world where ambiguity is shrinking, not increasing as gray zone proponents claim. While disruptive and tactically clever, these methods cannot compensate for declining conventional power and become less effective as NATO improves attribution, coordination, and resilience. This in turn will frustrate Russia’s ability to play a weak hand as it prioritizes provocative tactics over creating an effective strategy to improve its strategic and economic position in a post-Ukraine War future.

Joseph P. Durigan is a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy and a recent graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His master’s thesis was titled “The Gray Zone Surge: Russian Maritime Subversion in the Baltic Sea.”

Craig Whiteside is a professor of National Security Affairs for the US Naval War College resident program at the Naval Postgraduate School. His recent book is titled Nonstate Special Operations: Capabilities and Effects and he has written on the strategic failures of the gray zone concept.

Featured Image: Baltic Sea Exercise 2023. (U.S. Navy photo)

Gray Zone

China is Fighting the Third Opium War with Fish

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By Dr. Ian Ralby

In the 19th Century, the British East India Company was buying up huge amounts of Chinese goods – tea, silk, porcelain and more – but China was not interested in buying anything from Britain. As a way of balancing the accounts, Britain began smuggling opium from India into China, and demanding payment for it in silver. Not only did this help balance the trade accounts and create an insatiable drug dependency, it helped fund British naval and military buildups. Disaffected by the arrangement, the Chinese sought to push back, leading to the two Opium Wars. Thanks in part to the silver from the Opium trade, the technological superiority of European military might at that time resulted in China being easily defeated in both wars, and forced to accept woefully unfavorable trade terms as part of the peace. This led to the “Century of Humiliation” for China. Even after the Cultural Revolution, President Xi Jinping has been fond of historical narratives surrounding Chinese greatness, as well as Chinese grievances. Indeed, “historical fishing grounds” have been the basis for China’s legally unfounded nine (or ten) dash line claim over territory in the South China Sea. There can be no doubt that President Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party remember the Century of Humiliation and the tactics that characterized it.

New reporting from The Outlaw Ocean Project in The New Yorker indicates that China has adapted the British tactics of the Opium Wars to use fish as trade-based leverage to undermine the United States and its allies. While the context is quite different – the concept is similar. Setting aside the major role China plays in the opioid crisis that has taken the lives of more Americans than the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam combined, China is reaping huge economic benefits by selling fish to the United States in a manner that is directly funding its military and diplomatic buildups to be able to out compete the United States. Indeed, the Outlaw Ocean team has even traced Chinese-caught and processed fish to U.S. military bases, not to mention school cafeterias. And the revelations that people – often from third countries – have likely died in the process of catching this fish, and others, namely Uyghur minorities who have been enslaved to process this fish, add to the pernicious dynamics of this operation. Just as the British once resorted to criminality and degradation of human beings to fund their military, the Chinese have followed suit.

One of the lighthearted, albeit relevant, parts of the Outlaw Ocean’s reporting was the revelation that squid was unpopular in the United States until it was renamed “calamari” to make it sound more appealing. Now calamari appears on menus across the country and the remarkable demand for it – particularly breaded and fried – has driven China to become the world’s largest supplier of it. Yet how many conversations about the horrors of slavery have occurred while consuming fried calamari produced by slave labor?

It is clear that the Outlaw Ocean Project based some of their work on the detailed efforts of academics and practitioners to look into the implications of subsidies. China’s use of subsidies has propelled its Distant Water Fleet (DWF) to fish around the globe and in the process, disrupt both ecosystems and economies. Indeed, this issue has been years in the making, and diligent research from scholars like Dr. Tabitha Mallory has shown just how problematic this dynamic is in terms of both ocean sustainability and broader economic and social impacts. But it goes even further.

As has been expressed, the DWF is being used for much more than just catching fish. It is an information and intelligence collection source, a tool for hybrid aggression, and part of a strategy to “own the oceans by adverse possession.” In many ways, it is the main action arm of China’s efforts to build what amounts to an oceanic empire over the 70 percent of the earth that is covered in water. But this new reporting by the Outlaw Ocean Project reveals how the United States public is financing China’s aggression toward the United States. Not only are American children eating fish fingers made by Uyghur slaves, but public institutions in America are channeling their resources toward products that are financing China’s hostility. This is the dynamic of the Opium Wars that China has replicated. China’s production and targeted sale of fentanyl and other opioids may look and seem like the principal analogy to the Opium Wars, but the fish and all the major benefits the DWF provides to China’s efforts for military superiority are actually the main parallel.

Armed with this reporting, the U.S. should muster a whole-of-society response to this Chinese effort. If the U.S. is serious about “Great Power Competition,” it at least needs to stop scoring “own goals” by funding and emboldening the main competitor. But from the standpoints of both defense and security, these issues cannot be overlooked or marginalized. China is using its DWF globally in a manner that accrues tremendous benefits to the Chinese armed forces. The least that can be done is stop buying fish caught by the DWF and processed by enslaved Uyghurs and serving it on U.S. military bases. The U.S. should heed the famous line from Karl Marx – “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” It may also be worth returning to the history of the first two Opium Wars to see if there are any strategic lessons the U.S. can glean in countering Chinese efforts to win the third one.

Dr. Ian Ralby is CEO of I.R. Consilium, a family firm with leading expertise in maritime and resource security. A maritime lawyer by background, Dr. Ralby has worked in more than 90 countries around the world and is an advisor to various US government agencies and international organizations.

Featured Image: A Japanese fisheries patrol boat intercepts a Chinese fishing boat. (Japanese government photo)