China I: The Blue Miracle
China’s Xinjiang region, located on the country’s far northwest frontier, is a land of unforgiving extremes.1 At Xinjiang’s southwest border stands K2, at 28,251 feet the second highest mountain in the world.2 Nearly 100 climbers have died trying to reach K2’s summit, making attempts to scale it far more deadly than trying to reach the top of Mount Everest.3
The Karakoram Range, where K2 is found, is just one of four major ranges abutting, slicing through or ringing Xinjiang.4 The Kunlun runs along the province’s southeastern border; the Altai is found in Xinjiang’s northern reaches, and the Tian Shan spans its center.5 Together, the mountains, while breathtaking to look at, work to keep much of Xinjiang starved of moisture.6 Barely 6 inches of rain falls every year across Xinjiang’s 600,000 square miles.7
In fact, a huge swath of Xinjiang is taken up by China’s largest desert, the Taklamakan. Home to colossal sandstorms, the Taklamakan’s ever shifting dunes can top 600 feet, taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.8 The desert is credited with having buried 20 different cities over the ages, and it has come to be called by a variety of grim names.9 “The Land of Ruins” is one of them. “The Sea of Death” is another.10
The Taklamakan proved a forbidding obstacle for the Silk Road traders, and centuries later, it could still defeat the best efforts to push eastward across it.11 In 1895, in one of the earliest attempts by enterprising Europeans to better map the interior of the Taklamakan, a Swedish adventurer named Sven Hedin set out to cross it accompanied by four local guides, eight camels, two dogs, and seven chickens.12 Within days, two members of the party were dead.13 Those who did make it across drank chicken blood and camel urine to survive.14
Less than 10 percent of Xinjiang, then, has ever been fit for human habitation.15 Those who have eked out an existence mostly have been nomadic herdsmen, with refuge for them and their families found around a modest number of oases fed by mountaintop glaciers in the Tian Shan and Kunlun.16 Historically, Xinjiang’s native populations have included Turkic Uyghurs, Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Mongols, and Tajiks.17
Central Chinese authorities were long content to regard Xinjiang as a remote and rugged strategic buffer against an outside threat from the west.18 Shortly after the 1949 revolution, though, the state began to imagine Xinjiang as more than a wild outpost, and rather as a valuable territorial holding to be tamed and exploited, its people persuaded or conscripted to join China’s emergence into the modern world, and, in time, its campaign for global economic supremacy.19
Beginning in the 1950’s, Chinese government geologists discovered oil and gas in three of Xinjiang’s topographical basins – the Tarim, Junggar, and Tuha – and mounted some of the deepest drilling programs ever seen.20 Xinjiang became the western anchor of what was called the West-East Gas Pipeline, a monumental project that sends natural gas over 2,400 miles to cities such as Shanghai.21
At the same time, the state reengineered the Tarim River, Xinjiang’s longest, in a bid to turn the province’s hard and dry soil into farmable land.22 Reservoirs were built on the Tarim’s tributaries; diversion gates measured and allocated flow, and lined canals carried water to what would become newly leveled farmland.23 The Tarim, once an unremarkable waterway prone to seasonal flooding in an otherwise parched landscape, was suddenly a highly regulated and reliable supply system. The controlled use of the Tarim would help jumpstart the growing of a range of crops in Xinjiang, including an aggressive push to plant and harvest cotton.24
Amid the discovery of natural resource riches and the marvels of technology, there was always the daunting human project of somehow creating a workforce for the state’s ambitions in Xinjiang.25 The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) would handle that feat of reinvention.26 The XPCC is a corporate unit of the Chinese army, made up of former soldiers turned economic developers. They were sent to Xinjiang as the government agents meant to turn herdsmen into farmers.27 Land was seized; training programs were implemented and enforced; state-backed companies were launched; the reluctant were threatened with detention, and many were shipped out of Xinjiang to work in China's larger eastern cities.28M
The company’s record of coercive tactics in Xinjiang has earned it a notorious international reputation. Over the past decade, XPCC has converted more than half a million acres in Xinjiang to use for growing cotton, as well as a variety of other industries, from fruit farming to solar fields.29 The company has also helped the government relocate more than 10 percent of Xinjiang’s population—or over two and a half million people each year between 2014 and 2019 —through labor transfers.30 If brutal, the XPCC’s work in Xinjiang has been effective. Today, Xinjiang produces roughly 20 percent of the world’s supply of cotton, and is a major source of export crops such as tomatoes, lavender, and wine grapes.31
Of all the successes in Xinjiang over the last 75 years – surprising, enterprising, controversial, inhumane – none may be as remarkable as the latest: the Chinese are growing fish in Xinjiang, a place often referred to as the most landlocked spot on the planet.32
It turns out that in China’s earliest efforts to pull oil out of Xinjiang, its government drilling teams were regularly turning up evidence of underground aquifers, including underneath the Taklamakan.33 Researchers knew that the Taklamakan had once been entirely under water, connected to one of the planet's oceans. The desert’s sand and soil were littered with ancient coral fragments, microscopic plankton, bivalves, and gastropods.34 The Taklamakan’s salty soil, in fact, helped explain why some of the best preserved mummies ever found had been unearthed there.35
The aquifers found underneath Xinjiang's arid vastness would eventually be mapped, and tests would be done on the discovered water – to see both how pressurized and just how salty the water was.36 Initially, the tests suggested the waters under the Taklamakan and elsewhere across Xinjiang were a cruel joke – too salty to be used for farming, too bitter to be consumed by humans.37 The joke didn’t last. Chinese scientists eventually realized that the underground waters in Xinjiang could be adjusted to actually mimic seawater.38M
As a result, over 1,000 fish farms now dot Xinjiang, producing about 200,000 tons of seafood annually.39M Salmon, lobster, bass, carp, crab, shrimp – all of it and more raised in Xinjiang.40 Chinese media calls it the “Blue Miracle,” a maritime economy in a frontier home to what is known as the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility.41
“Raising fish in the desert?” China’s state broadcaster CCTV wrote in a 2025 article.42 “It sounds impossible, but in Xinjiang, it’s becoming a reality.”43
The notion of fish farming dates back millenia, and began humbly enough. Storms would wash fish ashore, stranding them in ponds and other small bodies of inland water.44 Rather than simply catching them and eating them, people found ways to feed them, and allow them to multiply. Researchers believe that no later than 475 B.C., China was far enough along in the practice to have worked up a manual on how best to carry it off.45 The manual laid out ideal water levels to keep and how to harvest the fish without draining the ponds.46 Carp was the dominant subject of China’s efforts. They bred often, did not eat their own, grew quickly – and tasted quite good.47
China was hardly alone. Ancient Egyptians raised tilapia in ponds off the Nile River.48 Roman engineers cultivated oysters in tidal lagoons.49 The appeal, of course, was straightforward. Fish are a vital source of protein for the diets of any country. Yet fishing is often a seasonal business, its productivity unpredictable from year to year. Farming fish could be year-round, reliable, and inexpensive.
Today, what is broadly called aquaculture is a global phenomenon. More than half of all seafood consumed by the world’s population now comes from aquaculture rather than wild catch.50 India alone produces some 11 million metric tons of farmed fish products every year.51 The raising of clams, oysters, scallops, and mussels – distinctive aquaculture marvels because they require no feed, and very little freshwater – has driven much of the explosive growth.52 In a 2019 report, the Nature Conservancy argued that by 2050, sustainably managed fish farms should become humanity’s primary source of seafood.53
Most ambitious fish farming falls into a small handful of models. In Asia, the dominant system is the freshwater pond: excavated basins stocked with hatchery-raised juveniles, fed daily, and aerated mechanically to prevent oxygen crashes.54 Along coasts, floating net pens hold fish in open water, relying on currents to disperse waste. Some fish farms operate fully enclosed recirculating systems, filtering and reusing water inside warehouses.
The $313 billion industry has generated varied and extraordinary good.55 In India, it is a major source of employment, particularly for women.56 In Bangladesh, the expansion of fish farming has helped drive down prices, making seafood more affordable for poorer households.57 The industry, even accounting for transporting the farmed fish around the world, is a far smaller source of carbon emissions than beef or pork.58
Recent efforts to push the nature and reach of the business have wound up pushing the boundaries of the imagination and technology. The Norwegians have built enormous, semi submersible structures in the open ocean, capable of holding volumes of water great enough to house 1.5 million salmon.59 The Chinese have built “aquaculture ships,” huge vessels sent to sea with 15 breeding cabins capable of holding 90,000 cubic meters of water.60
In Scotland, underwater robots are used to combat the threat of sea lice, a parasite that feeds on salmon.61 The robots identify the lice, and fire laser pulses to eradicate them. The inventions have not been exclusive to major commercial farm fishing. Modest fish farms in Indonesia have been using apps on smartphones to manage timed, more cost effective feeding schedules at their ponds.62
And then there is the engineering of the fish themselves. In the U.S., the seafood company AquAdvantage has won approval to raise cloned salmon.63 Fish farming therefore isn’t only about cages, pumps, and sensors anymore. It’s also about re-writing biology — treating growth rates and production timelines as variables that can be redesigned, not just managed.
But as with many feats of human ingenuity and profit making, aquaculture is freighted with a multitude of downsides. Crowding millions of fish together produces enormous volumes of waste.64 In shallow coastal pens, solid waste settles into thick sludge on the seafloor, smothering plants and animals.65 Excess nitrogen and phosphorus fuel algal blooms, kill wild fish, and drive away beachgoers.66 Fish bred to grow faster and larger sometimes escape, threatening native species.67
Perhaps most vexing for the sustainability of the industry is the zero sum question of feeding the world’s farmed fish. Aquaculture was supposed to be the solution to the dangerously depleted stocks of fish in the oceans. Over a third of the world’s stocks are overfished and worsening every year.68 But what farmed fish eat is other fish, much of it drawn from those same depleted stocks.
On July 25, 2021, at an outdoor theater located in northern Xinjiang, 50 villagers gathered. Officials with the Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture company were there to hand out cash – as much as $25,000 per village [or, about $200 per household].69
The Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture company is China’s poster child for its aquaculture breakthroughs in Xinjiang. Tianyun owns at least half a dozen aquaculture-related enterprises, including a breeding center, a processing plant, a cold-storage facility, and multiple salmon ponds, some measuring more than fifty yards across.70 The company sells roughly $30 million worth of seafood annually, producing more than 6,000 tons of fish a year and roughly 40 percent of China’s domestically produced salmon.71
The production of fish has been impressive, but for the state, Tianyun is a government darling for the ways it has allegedly managed to enlist and excite a local population for whom the idea of raising fish in the desert first felt like some kind of dark fantasy, or government scam.M Tianyun has generated jobs, for sure, but it has also invited workers, their families, and other villagers across the region to become shareholders in the desert seafood business.
The cash being handed out at the village gathering was one of the latest dividend payouts. When the first had happened years earlier, the locals weren’t entirely sure what to make of it.72 “Is this money really being given to me?” one local asked a reporter from CCTV. “Can I take it home?” Four years later, they’d grown a lot more comfortable with the returns on their investments.73 That July day, with music playing from speakers near the outdoor theater stage, state television was there to capture the moment.74
“There’s a real joy in counting money,” the CCTV reporter said breathlessly.75
China’s desert fish farming project is actually as much a consequence of self preservation as creative ingenuity. The country is both the world’s largest producer and consumer of seafood.76 Its extraordinary fleet of fishing vessels – more than 6,500 fishing boats working the world’s oceans, and another 200,000 operating in China’s coastal waters – is the stuff of legend and international alarm.77 And yet it has not been enough to satisfy the government. Aquaculture, a 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained, is central to Beijing’s efforts “to bolster food security.”78
As a result, China has been perhaps the most aggressive practitioner of fish farming. Through the 1980s and 1990s, local governments converted tidal flats and estuaries into shrimp ponds and marine cages, building hatcheries, feed mills, and export infrastructure.79 At first, most Chinese fish farms were concentrated along the eastern coast, particularly in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shandong, where sheltered bays and river deltas were rapidly converted into aquaculture zones.80 By 2014, aquaculture installations dotted more than 30 percent of China’s shoreline.81M
China did great business, and great damage. A 2015 study by researchers at China’s Academy of Fishery Sciences and Institute of Oceanography linked coastal aquaculture to algal blooms, nutrient depletion, and the fragmentation of wetlands by disrupting tidal flows. In the Yellow River Delta, salt marshes shrank by nearly 80 percent between 1984 and 2014.82 Waste runoff from fish farms became a major source of pollution: a 2019 study by the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science warned that nearly 80 billion gallons of wastewater— containing feces, excess feed, dead fish, antibiotics, and sedatives— were being discharged annually.83 This pollution has degraded critical waterways, including the Yangtze River, which supplies freshwater to Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta, which supplies Hong Kong.84 “While China’s fishery has made great achievements, it has also paid a great price,” the head of the fisheries authority said at a national conference in 2016, citing “unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable development.”85M
In response, Beijing moved to restructure the aquaculture industry. Officials called for reducing aquaculture in overcrowded coastal waters and expanding it inland.86 Within two years, authorities had removed roughly 300,000 coastal farming cages.87 In 2019, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued new guidance on the “green development of aquaculture,” urging provinces to “actively develop” fish farming in places that, like Xinjiang, have supplies of underground waters rich in salt.88
Converting the native populations of Xinjiang into eager and intrepid fishermen, Beijing realized, was going to be a challenge. The government had warned of the alleged “idleness” of Xinjiang’s people, publishing formal critiques that warned that if they were not enlisted in a structured economic enterprise, the people would spend their time gambling, lavish weddings or funerals, or engaging in “illegal religious and feudal superstitious activities.”89
“If we do not occupy the ideological and cultural positions in rural areas, they will be occupied by others,” Tang Renjian, then-head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, wrote in 2021.90
Of course, Beijing had demonstrated it was willing to use both enticements and force to accomplish its cultural and economic aims in Xinjiang. Developing Xinjiang as an aquaculture “miracle,” then, would require a mix of salesmanship, propaganda, and the threat of arrest.
Over a million people had been sent to detention camps in Xinjiang from 2017 to 2023 as locals were driven to give up their historic livelihoods and dig for oil or farm the land.91 By the end of 2024, the XPCC, Beijing’s muscle, partially or fully ran at least 50 fish farms in Xinjiang that collectively produced over $290 million worth of seafood.92
In northern Xinjiang, where the Tianyun company was headquartered, the largest ethnic group were Kazakhs, a people who had practiced nomadic pastoralism for ages.93 Tianyun partnered with a government-affiliated rural credit union to provide interest-free loans—typically about 10,000 yuan, or $1,500 dollars—to hundreds of local residents, allowing them to buy shares in a subsidiary that would support the fish farm through tasks like labor contracting and sales.94 Collectively, these households funded almost half of the subsidiary’s startup capital.95 In return, each household received fixed annual payments for several years, followed by dividends as a percentage of their initial pay-in.96 Villagers were also offered paid work operating equipment or harvesting fish.97
To further reassure and convince the locals, Tianyun and state media outlets have engaged in an elaborate advertising campaign of sorts, making films trumpeting the benefits of fish farming, and not so subtly warning of what resisting the province’s economic transformation might entail. “Villagers have dismounted from horses and stepped onto fishing boats,” a reporter said in a video published by state-run Xinhua News.98 The video interviewed a local man, Alalebai, who in 2014 was a sheep herder in the village of Jiaertuohan.99 “Life was difficult,” he later told a local news outlet.100 “When I went out to herd, I didn’t dare close my eyes for more than ten hours in a row, for fear of losing the sheep.”101
In 2014, Tianyun, working with a state-run poverty-alleviation program, established a salmon breeding outpost in Keshikalasu, a village near Alalebai’s home. Alalebai was hired to work at one of Tianyun’s fish farms, and by 2023 he was earning 48,000 yuan annually, more than four times his former income, according to a local news report.102 Zhang Xiu, the company’s chairman, said Tianyun aimed to create 10,000 jobs and generate three billion yuan—about $421 million—in revenue by 2025.
In a 2020 television segment, Alalebai gave reporters a tour of an apartment provided by Tianyun, with polished red floors, large windows, and a modern kitchen.103 “After my husband gained a stable job, our life changed tremendously,” his wife said.104 “This was all provided by the party and the government.”105 By 2023, Tianyun had purchased around a hundred homes in and around Kalasu Township for other employees.106
A second, more recent government film shot mostly at Tianyun, titled “Land of Hope,” had a rougher edge.107 It tells the story of a fledgling fish farm, and the local man, Qairat, behind it. He meets resistance from his neighbors, who fear chemicals used in fish farming might kill their cows and sheep.108 “Is this little bastard Qairat trying to wipe us all out?” one villager shouts.109
Qairat tries to pacify and persuade his friends. There will be profit sharing, and a future they could not have otherwise imagined. “The kids can’t afford college. The elderly can’t afford doctors,” Qairat’s girlfriend pleads on his behalf. “Is this really the life you want?”
One local man, Duman, is not on board, and he sets out to do damage to the fish farm. He is arrested and sentenced to a year in prison, but in a show of mercy by the court, he’s given the chance to avoid incarceration by maintaining good behavior during a probation of two years.110 Law enforcement officers sit down for tea with Qairat and his wayward friend Duman. Platters of shrimp, crab legs and salmon sashimi are stacked on a table.111 (Seafood is not native to the region’s cuisine; in 2023 Xinjiang residents consumed roughly six pounds of seafood per person – less than a fifth of the national average.)112 Teased by the others, Duman agrees to try some salmon.113 Qairat drapes an arm around Duman’s shoulders.114
“Our hometown has vast waters suitable for aquaculture,” Qairat says.115 An elder rises, slaps a stack of cash on the table, and declares, “To save our hometown, I’ll be the first to invest.”116
Tianyun said in a statement that claims of systemic forced labor “are completely factually unfounded” and described the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) as an unreasonable and politically motivated framework which violates the principles of fair international trade.117 Tianyun strictly abides by China’s laws on labor and contracts and resolutely protects the legitimate rights and interests of every employee. “Our company has never been involved in, nor will it ever participate in, any form of forced labor,” Tianyun said. “On the contrary, we provide competitive compensation, comprehensive occupational health and safety protections, and career development opportunities.”118 The XPCC did not respond to a request for comment.M
The Shishixian fish farm sits on the southeastern edge of the Taklamakan desert.119M Built in just three months beginning in March 2024, the roughly eight-acre site was carved out of the Taklamakan’s dunes.120
The Taklamakan remains a place of wonder and menace, marked by searing heat and arctic chill, with both sometimes experienced inside the same 24 hours. In 2019, a storm gathered along its eastern side.121 Rain cooled the air, making it dense, and that cold air effectively slammed into the desert floor.122 The wind then raced sideways, bulldozing sand and dust into the sky in what is called a “haboob,” a wall hundreds of feet tall.123 The wall was so vast that it kicked up a haze the color of tea, visible from space, that blanketed more than 200 miles of China, leading to school closures, traffic disruptions and the cancellation of all flights to and from Qiemo Airport in southern Xinjiang.124
Chinese authorities have been trying to rein in the Taklamakan for decades. In 1978, for instance, the government undertook an epic afforestation plan, known as the Green Great Wall project.125 The aim was to employ hundreds of thousands of people to plant 88 million acres of desert poplar and red willow trees at the edges of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts and thereby create a massive fence around it to disrupt sandstorms and stunt the desert’s growth.126 The trees were also meant to protect a 1,700-mile rail line that the government finished in 2022 that fully encircled the Taklamakan.127 That rail line now serves more than 10 million people across southern Xinjiang.128
To create fish farms in the Taklamakan, bulldozers flattened and compacted the sand before engineers tapped shallow wells — about six feet deep — of brackish groundwater.129 Lined ponds were created and filled, and technicians seeded them with specialized microorganisms, adjusting the water’s chemistry to something closer to seawater, and thus effectively transforming desert groundwater into a marine environment.130
Today, the Shishixian farm includes two outdoor ponds — one for grow-out, one for breeding — and an indoor ecological greenhouse housing 68 circular tanks, each roughly 16 feet in diameter, arranged in rows beneath plastic sheeting.131 Paddlewheel aerators churn the ponds, flinging arcs of spray into the scorching air, while automatic feeders and pumps can be controlled remotely from a small workshop.132 Pond water, kept between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius, runs on a near full-recirculation model, filtering and reusing water rather than discharging it into the surrounding sand.133 Against a backdrop of dunes, the farm raises grouper, mullet, sillago, and millions of pearl-bivalve and oyster seedlings.134 The farm did not respond to a request for comment.135
That roughly 250 fish farms exist in and around the Taklamakan – $100 million in seafood comes from the desert every year – is yet one more striking accomplishment for the Chinese aquaculture industry, perhaps its most memorable one.136 Yet for all its accomplishments in the Taklamakan, and in Xinjiang more broadly, authorities in Beijing have yet to crack what might be the single greatest challenge to its aquaculture aspirations.
Feeding the fish they are growing, it turns out, is the single most expensive aspect of fish farming, accounting for up to 70 percent of the industry’s operating budgets.137 The only commercially viable option at scale remains fishmeal: a pulverized, protein-rich powder made from wild fish caught at sea. More than a fifth of all fish harvested globally ends up as fishmeal or other non-human feed.138 The conundrum, then, is stark: the volume of fish needed to farm some of the world’s most popular species—salmon, shrimp, sea bass— far outstrips what the fish farms ultimately produce.139
Farmed salmon, one of the most popular types of seafood, has long been marketed as a modern answer to the limits of wild fishing.140 Yet the deeper problem raised by Xinjiang’s desert fish farms is the same one that shadows salmon aquaculture almost everywhere: not simply where the fish are raised, but what they are fed.M Move the cages inland, automate the ponds, filter and recirculate the water, and the arithmetic still leads back to the sea. Much of the industry remains dependent on turning wild fish into feed.
It’s a bad bit of math with other collateral costs. The inexpensive fish targeted by the fishmeal industry are the very populations relied on for basic sustenance in poorer countries. Much of the fish destined for fishmeal processing comes from Peru and Mauritania, Vietnam and Thailand. The environmental impact of fishmeal production – its waste fouls clean waterways; its stench blankets entire communities – is considerable, as well.141 Not least, the rapacious race to meet the demand for fishmeal has also led to spikes in illegal fishing across the world.
Researchers have explored alternative protein sources for the farmed fish — seaweed, cassava waste, black soldier fly larvae, even single-cell proteins derived from fungi or bacteria — but none is yet affordable at scale.142 Global fishmeal consumption, as a result, is projected to rise nearly 10 percent between 2022 and 2032, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
China in particular has struggled mightily to confront the idea that aquaculture as a solution to decimated wild fish stocks is actually exacerbating the crisis. Historically, its fish farms relied on forage fish pulled from coastal waters. By 2016, more than 30 percent of China’s coastal catch consisted of these species.143 The pressure proved unsustainable. Of fifteen fish species assessed in a 2020 Frontiers in Marine Science study, eleven were overfished, depleted, or outside safe biological limits—five of them forage fish.144 To ease the strain, China cut its near-shore fleet by roughly 40,000 vessels in 2020 and increasingly turned to imported fishmeal, especially from Peru.145 Today, China imports more than 40 percent of the world’s fishmeal, a share projected to rise to 55 percent by 2032, according to a 2023 UN report.146
“China wants food autonomy,” said Philip Chou, a China specialist with the environmental group Oceana. “But to get there, it’s also going to need feed autonomy.” Right now, Chou said, China has neither.
Sustainability, if the most daunting issue facing the Chinese aquaculture industry, is far from the only one. China also suffers from a credibility problem. Growing evidence shows that its companies often misrepresent to an unwitting public what kinds of farmed fish they are bringing to market.147 Fish, marked up and sold as salmon, are actually rainbow trout.148 What’s labeled cod is often, rather, pollock.149 Online, local Chinese consumers have not infrequently called out the scams.150
The concerns about the dishonesty go beyond matters of taste. In a 2018 interview with China Daily, Zhong Kai, a food safety expert, reacted to Chinese companies advertising salmon that was actually trout.151 “I do not recommend eating it raw,” he said, advising thorough cooking to kill parasites. Masami Takeuchi, a food safety officer at the FAO, added that illnesses from eating raw freshwater fish can be serious, “though not always obvious or immediate,” complicating diagnosis and treatment.152
Chinese companies have sought help from seafood quality-assurance outfits in reassuring the public – its own citizens and consumers worldwide – that forced labor and/or dangerous amounts of antibiotics weren't used in the production of its farmed fish.153 Those organizations, Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) among the most prominent, claim they are independent entities with exacting standards.154 But many researchers and ocean-sustainability advocates regard BAP and other similar firms as being unable or disinclined to root out real problems.155 The Chinese government, in any case, does not typically allow unannounced inspections of factories or farms, and it tightly restricts the activities of journalists investigating labor, environmental, or human-rights abuses.
And so, with increasing frequency, investigators have found illegal levels of drugs in the Chinese farmed fish -- antibiotics at levels that threaten humans, as well as the dangerous use of sedatives to calm the fish during transport.156M
In a May 2024 open letter, more than seventy environmental, animal welfare, and community organizations accused BAP of “greenwashing,” arguing that certified farms are “rarely, if ever, held to account for adverse outcomes” tied to their operations.157 The Aquaculture Stewardship Council, the other major global certification body, announced in 2024 that it would withdraw from China.158 While financial considerations were cited, industry reporting linked the decision to an investigation documenting the widespread use of state-sponsored forced labor, including Uyghur and North Korean workers, in Chinese seafood-processing plants.159
China’s efforts to sell the world on its fish farmed from Xinjiang has gone well beyond touting certifications by supposedly independent monitors. There is, after all, much at stake – feeding its own people first of all.160 As China’s president, Xi Jinping, put it in a 2012 speech, “The Chinese people’s rice bowls must be firmly in their own hands at all times.”161
And then there is the exploding market for seafood. Tianyun, the state’s favored company in northern Xinjiang, exports its farmed seafood products to more than a dozen countries.162M “Tianyun’s salmon products will be exported to all parts of the world,” Zhang Yuru, the company’s deputy general manager, said in 2024.163 The firm is also branching into salmon collagen peptide drinks and peptide tablets—protein supplements marketed as slowing the aging of skin and joints.164
Xinjiang received a record 323 million tourists in 2025, compared to around 200 million before the pandemic.165 A fledgling tourism business has grown up around the region’s fish farming success.166 It features a museum and a restaurant that serves Sichuan pepper whitefish, whitefish sashimi and caviar.167 “You can catch fish on site, weigh them and take them to the town restaurant for processing,” wrote one happy visitor in 2025 on a Chinese website similar to Yelp called Dianping.168 The company has also invited professional caviar makers from Finland to visit every year to teach its workers how to make caviar.169
The Chinese also have organized media tours for foreign reporters, and actively recruited foreign food buffs – called vloggers or “frontier influencers” – to record and post videos and other testimonials about the wonders of growing fish in Xinjiang.170
Among the most popular frontier influencers is a Russian student named Melissa. “Today, we’ve come to a salmon farm in Nilka, Xinjiang, to be an employee for a day, and see what it’s like for ourselves,” she said in her video, "Encounter Xinjiang: Fish Swimming out of the Mountains," which a state news outlet published in November 2025.171 These videos were subsequently amplified by media outlets affiliated with the XPCC, as well as on state-run channels on YouTube and Facebook.172 Melissa’s video, like many circulating during the Xinjiang seafood campaign, featured footage from Tianyun.173
A video featuring Jack, an American vlogger, offered a similar perspective. “Exploring Xinjiang with Jack: Technology Paves the Way for Green Development” showcased his tour of a fish farm located on the edge of the Taklamakan.174 “It’s incredible how they have developed such a barren land to this extent.”175
But it is the government itself that attempts to frame the unlikely industry it has engineered in Xinjiang in the grandest terms.
In a 2025 article published by state media, Xinjiang’s aquaculture hotbed in the deserts and rivers of its forbidding western frontier was declared “a testament to human ingenuity and resilience.”176M
“Xinjiang's aquaculture is not merely about producing fish,” the article went on, “it is about reimagining how inland regions can contribute to the nation's protein security, how technology can redefine agriculture, and how harmony between people and nature can be sustained in the most challenging of environments. From snow-fed rivers to desert oases, Xinjiang has shown that blue dreams can indeed flourish on dry land.”177
Beijing presents Xinjiang’s aquaculture boom as proof that technology can conquer geography. For foreign consumers, though, the real significance may lie elsewhere. The story of fish raised in one of the most arid places on earth is also a story about how modern food systems displace their burdens: drawing feed from distant seas, labor from vulnerable populations, and trust from consumers asked to believe that abundance can be manufactured without meaningful sacrifice somewhere else.