cryptogon.com

Monitoring ship-tracking data on Christmas Day, Jason Wang could tell something “unusual” was underway as fishing boats swarmed into two parallel inverted Ls,each about 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) long.

Wang could see the roughly 2,000 fishing boats among the many thousands of vessels that ply the busy waterway through their automatic identification systems (AIS) — a GPS-type signal that commercial ships use to avoid collisions.

The vessels, which were as close as 500 metres (1,640 feet) to each other, held their positions for about 30 hours in near gale-force winds and then suddenly scattered.

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Maritime and military experts told AFP the massing of Chinese fishing boats on December 25, about 300 kilometres northeast of Taiwan, was on a scale they had never seen before.

Another incident detected in early January involved around 1,000 Chinese fishing vessels clustered in an uneven rectangle, about 400 kilometres long, for more than a day in the same area of the East China Sea.

Hundreds of those vessels were also detected in the December 25 event, Wang told AFP in an interview in Taipei.

Last week, around 1,200 boats massed in two parallel lines further east of the January and December events and held their positions for about 30 hours, Wang said.

China’s massive fishing fleet operates in the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and the South China Sea, competing with fishers from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

While there is debate about why so many Chinese fishing vessels would gather in geometric formations in the open sea, experts widely agree that they were not there to fish.