China III: Selling The Story of Desert Fish Farming
On May 22, 2018, China Central Television broadcast a glowing television segment about salmon farming in western China. Over images of sleek fish cutting through clear water, the narrator marveled that “a precious fish like salmon, which typically lives in the open ocean,” could now be raised in the desert. Technology had made the improbable possible. “The land is the same land, and the people are the same people,” the program declared, “but when technology is brought in, miracles are born.”1
Viewers were unconvinced and they immediately began voicing skepticism about this seafood coming from such a surprising place. Within days, Chinese social-media users questioned whether the fish on screen was actually salmon at all. “People expect Atlantic salmon, but we’re getting freshwater rainbow trout that costs half as much,” one Beijing-based WeChat account complained. “How could you not be angry?”2 The science writer Fang Shimin put it bluntly: “This is cheap rainbow trout being passed off as expensive salmon.”3
Where the media campaign had hoped to tell a bigger and more hopeful story about the success of fish farming in a place that most people thought was impossible, the public reaction to the story veered in a different direction.4 China has rapidly expanded its fish farms in its historically restive and inland west, erecting more than 1,000 farms in Xinjiang, a desert region known to be the most landlocked point on earth.5M The expansion was motivated by a slate of priorities, including food security, settling a nomadic and politically volatile population, poverty alleviation, and reducing fishing pressure on China’s polluted eastern shores. In a country like China, which has the second highest population in the world and a growing middle class, food security is national security. The state-led media campaign around China’s desert seafood also sought to redirect western attention away from human rights abuses that are pervasive in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been held in detention camps and the government has engaged in large-scale land seizures, forced sterilizations, and criminal penalties for speaking native languages or practicing religious and cultural traditions.6
The growth of fish farms in China’s west is the focus of a sweeping investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington DC, which showed how much seafood from Xinjiang is reaching the US, including to government facilities, in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.7 The investigation unveiled the hidden role of cost-saving tactics such as forced labor and land appropriation in China’s expanding aquaculture industry.
China’s farmed seafood 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.8 Fish, marked up and sold as salmon, are actually rainbow trout, and there are no indications that practices have changed since 2018. Online, local Chinese consumers have not infrequently called out the scams.
The concerns about mislabeled salmon went 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. “I do not recommend eating it raw,” he said, advising thorough cooking to kill parasites.9 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.10
As with many feats of human ingenuity and profit making, aquaculture is freighted with a multitude of downsides: crowding, disease, waste, chemical intervention.11 Perhaps most vexing for the sustainability of the industry is the zero-sum question of feeding the world’s farmed fish. Feed accounts for roughly 70 percent of operating costs, and the only commercially viable option at scale remains fishmeal: a 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. Much of it comes from poorer countries, including Peru, Mauritania, Vietnam, and Thailand. The paradox is stark: some of the world’s most popular farmed species—salmon, shrimp, sea bass—consume more fish than they produce. A ranched tuna can eat more than fifteen times its weight in wild fish before reaching the market. Like ethanol, which was pitched as a greener alternative to regular gasoline but is actually more carbon intensive, the practice of catching food to feed food is highly wasteful in terms of energy loss and the use of the planet’s resources.
Researchers have also increasingly found illegal levels of drugs in farmed fish, including the use of antibiotics at levels that threaten humans.12 A 2020 Nature study found that aquaculture has the highest antibiotic-use intensity per kilogram of biomass, exceeding usage in both humans and land-based livestock.13
Sedatives have been another flashpoint. Chinese farmers have used diazepam to calm fish during transport, despite its prohibition. Chinese government inspections have repeatedly detected the drug in farmed seafood.14 In 2021, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs began requiring routine diazepam testing. A 2023 paper in China Food Hygiene Journal described diazepam residues as “widely detected” in water and seafood products.15 Since 2021, provincial inspections have identified at least 650 batches of aquaculture products containing banned or excessive drugs, including roughly 200 with diazepam.16
Questions about the safety of mislabeled Xinjiang seafood are relevant for Western consumers, too. One company, called Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture, now ships to 14 countries, including the US, where its products are sold at Walmart, served at American schools and prisons and military bases.M This trade occurs in violation of a U.S. ban on goods produced in Xinjiang or by ethnic minorities from the region. Tianyun’s seafood reaches the US by way of supplier deals with Aquastar and Sysco.17
Tianyun said in a statement that claims of systemic forced labor “are completely factually unfounded” and described the U.S. ban as unreasonable and politically motivated.18 The company added that it strictly abides by China’s laws on labor and contracts. Aquastar did not reply to a request for comment from The Outlaw Ocean Project. Sysco said they expect their suppliers to follow all US, international and local laws and that they suspend contracts when they do not. Walmart confirmed that it sources seafood from Aqua Star.
Numerous supply-chain laws exist to prevent the import of prohibited goods into the United States. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was signed into law in 2021, introducing a legal presumption that all goods produced from Xinjiang, China, or by ethnic minority workers from the province, are products of forced labor unless proven otherwise.19 Rather than primarily relying on advocates or journalists having to prove the existence of forced labor tied to a certain product, the law mandates that suppliers and importers prove that they have no connection to Uyghur labor. The law also requires U.S. Customs and Border Protection to block the import of these goods. The U.S. government has already investigated the working conditions in a variety of other industries, including those for solar panels, auto parts, computer chips, palm oil, sugar, and tomatoes. Lawmakers and supply chain experts have argued that seafood should be next.
The Chinese government’s effort to sell the world on Xinjiang seafood is not new. "We must ... enhance brand building and awareness of the market expansion of Xinjiang's seafood enterprises," said Vice Minister of Agriculture Niu Dun in 2011, during a symposium on fisheries aid to Xinjiang.20 The government’s 2017 "Fisheries Poverty Alleviation and Tibet and Xinjiang Aid Action Plan” called for local government offices to “strengthen communication and coordination with mainstream media” and “systematically publicize the progress of fishery poverty alleviation,” fostering “an environment of positive public opinion.”21M
To that end, the government has in recent years bolstered “Red Tourism” in Xinjiang, including to aquaculture farms and attractions like what one local official said was “Xinjiang's first cold-water fish theme park.” Less of an amusement park, the $6-million center is located at a Wenquan-County fish farm run by the Xinjiang Saihu Fishery Technology Development company. It features a museum and a restaurant that serves white salmon, Sichuan pepper whitefish, whitefish sashimi and caviar.22 “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. Xinjiang received a record 323 million tourists in 2025, compared to around 200 million before the pandemic.23 (Xinjiang Saihu did not respond to a request for comment.)M
The marketing push intensified in August 2023, when there was a sharp spike in the posting of social media content on the topic. Posts about Xinjiang seafood surged across Chinese social-media platforms.24 Hashtags such as “Xinjiang welcomes everyone to come eat seafood” and “No joke—Xinjiang really does produce seafood” climbed Weibo’s Hot Search List.25 On Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, interactions tied to Xinjiang seafood jumped spectacularly.26 A seafood industry report later said that videos associated with “Xinjiang seafood” and “Xinjiang salmon” amassed more than 150 million views in 2023.27 One widely circulated Douyin clip, “Xinjiang Salmon ‘Leaps’ onto the World Table,” drew more than 2.7 million views and helped touch off the frenzy. Like many of the videos that followed, it lingered on crystalline mountain water, gleaming facilities, and the visual incongruity of prized fish emerging from Xinjiang.
Soon the theme leapt beyond China’s own internet. YouTube, which is banned in China, saw a sharp rise in Xinjiang seafood videos that fall.28 The message was no longer meant only for domestic audiences. Xinjiang seafood was being staged for foreign consumption too—not just as food, but as an emblem of innovation, abundance, and purity.
The social media spike happened amid a broader debate inside China over seafood safety, following Japan’s August 24, 2023 release into the Pacific Ocean of more than a million tons of radioactive wastewater that had accumulated since the 2011 tsunami-triggered nuclear meltdown.29 Beijing condemned the release as a "selfish and irresponsible act" and imposed a blanket ban on all Japanese aquatic products. Before the ban, China was Japan's largest seafood market, accounting for over 20 percent of its total exports. Tensions were already high due to Japan's increasing defense cooperation with the U.S. and its sympathetic stance toward Taiwan. The videos promoted Xinjiang seafood as a safe alternative to imports from Japan by emphasizing that the water used in China’s western fish farms was from purified snowmelt from Tian Shan, a mountain system that traverses Xinjiang.
“All signs point to this being a coordinated campaign,” said Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He explained that it had unusual speed and reach due to top-down and algorithmic amplification as different from a natural viral event, which typically grows slowly through grassroots sharing. In his view, the campaign served the purpose of redirecting attention from mounting international scrutiny after a 2023 investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project found that seafood plants in Shandong had used thousands of Xinjiang labor transfers to process fish destined for major Western markets.30 Against that backdrop, Ryan argued, the upbeat Xinjiang seafood videos functioned as a kind of information flooding, crowding search and recommendation systems with stories of “fishery miracles” rather than forced labor.
As part of the same effort, the Chinese government has also 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.31
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 she published in September 2025.32 These videos were subsequently amplified by media outlets affiliated with the XPCC, as well as on state-run channels on YouTube and Facebook.33 Melissa’s video, like many circulating during the Xinjiang seafood campaign, featured footage from Tianyun.
A video featuring Jack, an American vlogger, offered a similar perspective.34 “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. “It’s incredible how they have developed such a barren land to this extent."
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.”35
“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.”36
China’s success in Xinjiang has been built on the foundations of seized land and the forced transformation of traditional nomads into fish farmers. Some has been achieved with the promise of communal wealth; some has been accomplished as a consequence of threats of relocation or detention. “Villagers have dismounted from horses and stepped onto fishing boats,” a reporter said in a video published by state-run Xinhua News.37M
Such propaganda invariably portrays China’s Western inhabitants – Mongolians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs – as indolent residents on resource-rich lands, who lack the ability to unlock its potential without intervention.38 This type of state-driven narrative is neither new nor unique: Australia, Canada and the U.S. portrayed their native populations in a similar way as a justification for land grabs and forced relocation.
The U.S. government has characterized China’s actions in Xinjiang as a form of genocide and banned the import of goods from the region. The revelation that even the U.S. government is purchasing seafood from a company that sources from this region in violation of the ban is striking since such purchases, paid for by taxpayer dollars, are supposed to face higher scrutiny.
Beijing presents Xinjiang’s aquaculture boom as proof that technology can conquer geography. Inland aquaculture can advance food security by strengthening domestic supplies of protein increasingly favored by China’s growing middle class.39 For foreign consumers, 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.