The Crimes
Behind
the Seafood
You Eat

At the time, many villagers who had taken jobs as deckhands on foreign fishing ships were returning with enough money to buy motorcycles and houses. Anhar suggested that he and Aritonang go to sea, too, and Aritonang agreed, saying, “As long as we’re together.” He intended to use the money to fix up his parents’ house or maybe to start a business. Firmandes Nugraha, another friend, worried that Aritonang was not cut out for hard labor. “We took a running test, and he was too easily exhausted,” he said. But Aritonang wouldn’t be dissuaded. A year later, in July, he and Anhar travelled to the port city of Tegal, and applied for work through a manning agency called PT Bahtera Agung Samudra. (The agency seems not to have a license to operate, according to government records, and did not respond to requests for comment.) They handed over their passports, copies of their birth certificates, and bank documents. At eighteen, Aritonang was still young enough that the agency required him to provide a letter of parental consent. He posted a picture of himself and other recruits, writing, “Just a bunch of common folk who hope for a successful and bright future.”

This piece was published in collaboration with the Outlaw Ocean Project.

The captain’s quarters were on the uppermost deck; the Chinese officers slept on the level below him, and the Chinese deckhands under that. The Indonesian workers occupied the bowels of the ship. Aritonang and Anhar lived in cramped cabins with bunk beds. Clotheslines of drying socks and towels lined the walls, and beer bottles littered the floor. The Indonesians were paid about three thousand dollars a year, plus a twenty-dollar bonus for every ton of squid caught. Once a week, a list of each man’s catch was posted in the mess hall to encourage the crew to work harder. Sometimes the officers patted the Indonesian deckhands on their heads, as though they were children. When angry, they insulted or struck them. The foreman slapped and punched workers for mistakes. “It’s like we don’t have any dignity,” Anhar said.

The ship was rarely near enough to land to get cell reception, and, in any case, most deckhands didn’t have phones that would work abroad. Chinese crew members were occasionally allowed to use a satellite phone on the ship’s bridge. But when Aritonang and other Indonesians asked to call home the captain refused. After a couple of weeks on board, a deckhand named Rahman Finando got up the nerve to ask whether he could go home. The captain said no. A few days later, another deckhand, Mangihut Mejawati, found a group of Chinese officers and deckhands beating Finando, to punish him for asking to leave. “They beat his whole body and stepped on him,” Mejawati said. The other deckhands yelled for them to stop, and several jumped into the fray. Eventually, the violence ended, but the deckhands remained trapped on the ship. Mejawati told me, “It’s like we’re in a cage.”

Almost a hundred years before Columbus, China dominated the seas. In the fifteenth century, China’s emperor dispatched a fleet of “treasure ships” that included warships, transports for cavalry horses, and merchant vessels carrying silk and porcelain to voyage around the Indian Ocean. They were some of the largest wooden ships ever built, with innovations like balanced rudders and bulwarked compartments that predated European technology by centuries. The armada’s size was not surpassed until the navies of the First World War. But during the Ming dynasty political instability led China to turn inward. By the mid-sixteenth century, sailing on a multi-masted ship had become a crime. In docking its fleet, China lost its global preëminence. As Louise Levathes, the author of “When China Ruled the Seas,” told me, “The period of China’s greatest outward expansion was followed by the period of its greatest isolation.”

For most of the twentieth century, distant-water fishing—much of which takes place on the high seas—was dominated by the Soviet Union, Japan, and Spain. But the collapse of the U.S.S.R., coupled with expanding environmental and labor regulations, caused these fleets to shrink. Since the sixties, though, there have been advances in refrigeration, satellite technology, engine efficiency, and radar. Vessels can now stay at sea for more than two years without returning to land. As a result, global seafood consumption has risen fivefold.

Squid fishing, or jigging, in particular, has grown with American appetites. Until the early seventies, Americans consumed squid in tiny amounts, mostly at niche restaurants on the coasts. But as overfishing depleted fish stocks the federal government encouraged fishermen to shift their focus to squid, whose stocks were still robust. In 1974, a business-school student named Paul Kalikstein published a master’s thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried. Promoters suggested calling it “calamari,” the Italian word, which made it sound more like a gourmet dish. (“Squid” is thought to be a sailors’ variant of “squirt,” a reference to squid ink.) By the nineties, chain restaurants across the Midwest were serving squid. Today, Americans eat a hundred thousand tons a year.

China launched its first distant-water fishing fleet in 1985, when a state-owned company called the China National Fisheries Corporation dispatched thirteen trawlers to the coast of Guinea-Bissau. China had been fishing its own coastal waters aggressively. Since the sixties, its seafood biomass has dropped by ninety per cent. Zhang Yanxi, the general manager of the company, argued that joining “the ranks of the world’s offshore fisheries powers” would make the country money, create jobs, feed its population, and safeguard its maritime rights. The government held a grand farewell ceremony for the launch of the first ships, with more than a thousand attendees, including Communist Party élites. A promotional video described the crew as “two hundred and twenty-three brave pioneers cutting through the waves.”

Since then, China has invested heavily in its fleet. The country now catches more than five billion pounds of seafood a year through distant-water fishing, the biggest portion of it squid. China’s seafood industry, which is estimated to be worth more than thirty-five billion dollars, accounts for a fifth of the international trade, and has helped create fifteen million jobs. The Chinese state owns much of the industry—including some twenty per cent of its squid ships—and oversees the rest through the Overseas Fisheries Association. Today, the nation consumes more than a third of the world’s fish.

China’s fleet has also expanded the government’s international influence. The country has built scores of ports as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure program that has, at times, made it the largest financier of development in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. These ports allow it to shirk taxes and avoid meddling inspectors. The investments also buy its government influence. In 2007, China loaned Sri Lanka more than three hundred million dollars to pay for the construction of a port. (A Chinese state-owned company built it.) In 2017, Sri Lanka, on the verge of defaulting on the loan, was forced to strike a deal granting China control over the port and its environs for ninety-nine years.

Military analysts believe that China uses its fleet for surveillance. In 2017, the country passed a law requiring private citizens and businesses to support Chinese intelligence efforts. Ports employ a digital logistics platform called Logink, which tracks the movement of ships and goods in the surrounding area—including, possibly, American military cargo. Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told me, “This is really dangerous information for the U.S. to be handing over.” (The Chinese Communist Party has dismissed these concerns, saying, “It is no secret that the U.S. has become increasingly paranoid about anything related to China.”)

China also pushes its fleet into contested waters. “China likely believes that, in time, the presence of its distant-water fleet will convert into some degree of sovereign control over those waters,” Ralby, the maritime-security specialist, told me. Some of its ships are disguised as fishing vessels but actually form what experts call a “maritime militia.” According to research collected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Chinese government pays the owners of some of these ships forty-five hundred dollars a day to remain in contested areas for most of the year. Satellite data show that, last year, several dozen ships illegally fished in Taiwanese waters and that there were two hundred ships in disputed portions of the South China Sea. The ships help execute what a recent Congressional Research Service study called “ ‘gray zone’ operations that use coercion short of war.” They escort Chinese oil-and-gas survey vessels, deliver supplies, and obstruct foreign ships.

Sometimes these vessels are called into action. In December, 2018, the Filipino government began to repair a runway and build a beaching ramp on Thitu Island, a piece of land claimed by both the Philippines and China. More than ninety Chinese ships amassed along its coast, delaying the construction. In 2019, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Filipino boat anchored at Reed Bank, a disputed region in the South China Sea that is rich in oil reserves. Zhou Bo, a retired Chinese senior colonel, recently warned that these sorts of clashes could spark a war between the U.S. and China. (The Chinese government declined to comment on these matters. But Mao Ning, a spokesperson for its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has previously defended her country’s right to uphold “China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime order.”) Greg Poling, a senior fellow at C.S.I.S., noted that taking ownership of contested waters is part of the same project as assuming control of Taiwan. “The goal with these fishing ships is to reclaim ‘lost territory’ and restore China’s former glory,” he said.

China bolsters its fleet with more than seven billion dollars a year in subsidies, as well as with logistical, security, and intelligence support. For instance, it sends vessels updates on the size and location of the world’s major squid colonies, allowing the ships to coördinate their fishing. In 2022, I watched about two hundred and sixty ships jigging a patch of sea west of the Galápagos. The armada suddenly raised anchor and, in near simultaneity, moved a hundred miles to the southeast. Ted Schmitt, the director of Skylight, a maritime-monitoring program, told me that this is unusual: “Fishing vessels from most other countries wouldn’t work together on this scale.” In July of that year, I pulled alongside the Zhe Pu Yuan 98, a squid ship that doubles as a floating hospital to treat deckhands without bringing them to shore. “When workers are sick, they will come to our ship,” the captain told me, by radio. The boat typically carried a doctor and maintained an operating room, a machine for running blood tests, and videoconferencing capabilities for consulting with doctors back in China. Its predecessor had treated more than three hundred people in the previous five years.

In February, 2022, I went with the conservation group Sea Shepherd and a documentary filmmaker named Ed Ou, who also translated on the trip, to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, and boarded a Chinese squid jigger there. The captain gave permission for me and a couple of my team members to roam freely as long as I didn’t name his vessel. He remained on the bridge but had an officer shadow me wherever I went. The mood on the ship felt like that of a watery purgatory. The crew was made up of thirty-one men; their teeth were yellowed from chain-smoking, their skin sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness. The scene recalled an observation of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who divided people into three categories: the living, the dead, and those at sea.

Looking nervous, the younger deckhand waved us into a dark hallway. He began typing on his cell phone. “I can’t disclose too much right now given I still need to work on the vessel, if I give too much information it might potentially create issues on board,” he wrote. He gave me a phone number for his family and asked me to contact them. “Can you get us to the embassy in Argentina?” he asked. Just then, my minder rounded the corner, and the deckhand walked away. Minutes later, my team members and I were ushered off the ship.

When I returned to shore, I contacted his family. “My heart really aches,” his older sister, a math teacher in Fujian, said, after hearing of her brother’s situation. Her family had disagreed with his decision to go to sea, but he was persistent. She hadn’t known that he was being held captive, and felt helpless to free him. “He’s really too young,” she said. “And now there is nothing we can do, because he’s so far away.”

One of Aritonang’s friends on board was named Heri Kusmanto. “When we boarded the ship in the first weeks, Heri was a lively person,” Mejawati said. “He chatted, sang, and joked with all of us.” Kusmanto’s job was to carry hundred-pound baskets of squid down to the refrigerated hold. He sometimes made mistakes, and that earned him beatings. “He did not dare fight back,” a deckhand named Fikran told me. “He would just stay quiet and stand still.” The ship’s cook often struck Kusmanto, so he avoided him by eating plain white rice in the kitchen when the cook wasn’t around. Kusmanto soon got sick. He lost his appetite and stopped speaking, communicating mostly through gestures. “He was like a toddler,” Mejawati said. Then Kusmanto’s legs and feet swelled and started to ache.

Kusmanto seemed to be suffering from beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B₁, or thiamine. Its name derives from a Sinhalese word, beri, meaning “weak” or “I cannot.” It is often caused by a diet consisting mainly of white rice, instant noodles, or wheat flour. Symptoms include tingling, burning, numbness, difficulty breathing, lethargy, chest pain, dizziness, confusion, and severe swelling. Like scurvy, beriberi was common among nineteenth-century sailors. It also has a history in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps. If untreated, it can be fatal.

The contract typically used by Kusmanto’s manning agency stipulated heavy financial penalties for workers and their families if they quit prematurely. It also allowed the company to take workers’ identity papers, including their passports, during the recruitment process, and to keep the documents if they failed to pay a fine for leaving early—provisions that violate laws in the U.S. and Indonesia. Still, as Kusmanto’s condition worsened, his Indonesian crewmates asked whether he could go home. The captain refused. (Rongcheng Wangdao denied wrongdoing. The captains of Chinese ships in this piece could not be identified for comment. A spokesman for the manning agency blamed Kusmanto for his illness, writing, “When on the ship, he didn’t want to take a shower, he didn’t want to eat, and he only ate instant noodles.”)

“Short of catching them in the act, this is as close as you can get to firm evidence,” Michael J. Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador, told me. (Rongcheng Wangdao’s vessels have been known to fish in unauthorized areas; one of the Zhen Fa 7’s sister ships was fined for unlawfully entering Peruvian waters in 2017, and another was found illicitly fishing off the coast of North Korea. The company declined to comment on this matter.) Transferring Kusmanto to another vessel would have required disclosing the Zhen Fa 7’s location, which might have been incriminating.

By early August, Kusmanto had become disoriented. Other deckhands demanded that he be given medical attention. Eventually, the captain relented, and transferred him to another ship, which carried him to port in Lima. He was taken to a hospital, where he recovered; afterward, he was flown home. (Kusmanto could not be reached for comment.) Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, which had by then been at sea for a year, felt a growing sense of isolation. “They had initially told us that we would be sailing for eight months, and then they would land the ship,” Anhar said. “The fact was we never landed anywhere.”

China does more illegal fishing than any other country, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Operating on the high seas is expensive, and there is virtually no law-enforcement presence—which encourages fishing in forbidden regions and using prohibited techniques to gain a competitive advantage. Aggressive fishing comes at an environmental cost. A third of the world’s stocks are overfished. Squid stocks, once robust, have declined dramatically. More than thirty countries, including China, have banned shark finning, but the practice persists. Chinese ships often catch hammerhead, oceanic whitetip, and blue sharks so that their fins can be used in shark-fin soup. In 2017, Ecuadorian authorities discovered at least six thousand illegally caught sharks on board a single reefer. Other marine species are being decimated, too. Vessels fishing for totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladder is highly prized in Chinese medicine, use nets that inadvertently entangle and drown vaquita porpoises, which live only in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Researchers estimate that, as a result, there are now only some ten vaquitas left in existence. China has the world’s largest fleet of bottom trawlers, which drag nets across the seafloor, levelling coral reefs. Marine sediment stores large amounts of carbon, and, according to a recent study in Nature, bottom trawlers release almost a billion and a half tons of carbon dioxide each year—as much as that released by the entire aviation industry. China’s illicit fishing practices also rob poorer countries of their own resources. Off the coast of West Africa, where China maintains a fleet of hundreds of ships, illegal fishing has been estimated to cost the region more than nine billion dollars a year.

The world’s largest concentration of illegal fishing ships may be a fleet of Chinese squidders in North Korean waters. In 2017, in response to North Korea’s nuclear- and ballistic-missile tests, the United Nations Security Council, with apparent backing from China, imposed sanctions intended to deprive Kim Jong Un’s government of foreign currency, in part by blocking it from selling fishing rights, a major source of income. But, according to the U.N., Pyongyang has continued to earn foreign currency—a hundred and twenty million dollars in 2018 alone—by granting illicit rights, predominantly to Chinese fishermen. An advertisement on the Chinese Web site Zhihu offers permits issued by the North Korean military for “no risk high yield” fishing with no catch limits: “Looking forward to a win-win cooperation.” China seems unable or unwilling to enforce sanctions on its ally.

Chinese boats have contributed to a decline in the region’s squid stock; catches are down by roughly seventy per cent since 2003. Local fishermen have been unable to compete. “We will be ruined,” Haesoo Kim, the leader of an association of South Korean fishermen on Ulleung Island, which I visited in May, 2019, said. North Korean fishing captains have been forced to head farther from shore, where their ships get caught in storms or succumb to engine failure, and crew members face starvation, freezing temperatures, and drowning. Roughly a hundred small North Korean fishing boats wash up on Japanese shores annually, some of them carrying the corpses of fishermen. Chinese boats in these waters are also known for ramming patrol vessels. In 2016, Chinese fishermen rammed and sank a South Korean cutter in the Yellow Sea. In another incident, the South Korean Coast Guard opened fire on more than two dozen Chinese ships that rushed at its vessels.

In 2019, I went with a South Korean squid ship to the sea border between North Korea and South Korea. It didn’t take us long to find a convoy of Chinese squidders headed into North Korean waters. We fell in alongside them and launched a drone to capture their identification numbers. One of the Chinese captains blared his horn and flashed his lights—warning signs in maritime protocol. Since we were in South Korean waters and at a legal distance, our captain stayed his course. The Chinese captain then abruptly cut toward us, on a collision trajectory. Our captain veered away when the Chinese vessel was only thirty feet off.

Shortly after New Year’s Day, 2021, the Zhen Fa 7 rounded the tip of South America and stopped briefly in Chilean waters, close enough to shore to get cell-phone reception. Aritonang went to the bridge and, through pantomime and broken English, asked one of the officers whether he could borrow his phone. The officer indicated that it would cost him, rubbing his forefinger and thumb together. Aritonang ran below deck, sold some of his cigarettes and snacks to other deckhands, borrowed whatever money he could, and came back with the equivalent of about thirteen dollars, which bought him five minutes. He dialled his parents’ house, and his mother answered, excited to hear his voice. He told her that he would be home by May and asked to speak to his father. “He’s resting,” she told him. In fact, he had died of a heart attack several days earlier, but Aritonang’s mother didn’t want to upset her son while he was at sea. She later told their pastor that she was looking forward to Aritonang’s return. “He wants to build a house for us,” she said.

Soon afterward, the ship dropped anchor in the Blue Hole, an area near the Falkland Islands, where ongoing territorial disputes between the U.K. and Argentina provide a gap in maritime enforcement that ships can exploit. Aritonang grew homesick, staying in his room and eating mostly instant noodles. “He seemed to become sad and tired,” Fikran said. That January, Aritonang fell ill with beriberi. The whites of his eyes turned yellow, and his legs became swollen. “Daniel was in pretty bad shape,” Anhar told me. The captain refused to get him medical attention. “There was still a lot of squid,” Anhar said. “We were in the middle of an operation.” In February, the crew unloaded their catch onto a reefer that carried it to Mauritius. But, for reasons that remain unclear, the captain refused to send Aritonang to shore as well.

Eventually, Aritonang could no longer walk. The Indonesian crew went to the bridge again and confronted the captain, threatening to strike if he didn’t get Aritonang medical help. “We were all against the captain,” Anhar said. Finally, the captain acquiesced, and, on March 2nd, transferred Aritonang to a fuel tanker, the Marlin, which agreed to carry him to Montevideo, Uruguay. The Marlin’s crew brought him to a service area off the coast, where a skiff picked him up and took him to the port. A maritime agency representing Rongcheng Wangdao in Uruguay called a local hospital, and ambulance workers took him there.

Jesica Reyes, who is thirty-six, is one of the few interpreters of Indonesian in Montevideo. She taught herself the language while working at an Internet café that was popular among Indonesian crews; they called her Mbak, meaning “Miss” or “big sister.” From 2013 to 2021, fishing ships, most of them Chinese, disembarked a dead body in Montevideo roughly every month and a half. Over a recent dinner, Reyes told me about hundreds of deckhands in need whom she had assisted. She described one deckhand who died from a tooth infection because his captain wouldn’t bring him to shore. She told me of another ailing deckhand whose agency neglected to take him to a hospital, keeping him in a hotel room while his condition deteriorated; he eventually died.

On March, 7, 2021, Reyes was asked by the maritime agency to go to the emergency room to help doctors communicate with Aritonang; she was told that he had a stomach ache. When he arrived at the hospital, however, his whole body was swollen, and she could see bruises around his eyes and neck. He whispered to her that he had been tied by the neck. (Other deckhands later told me that they hadn’t seen this happen, and were unsure when he sustained the injuries.) Reyes called the maritime agency and said, “If this is a stomach ache . . . You’re not looking at this young man. He is all messed up!” She took photographs of his condition, before doctors asked her to stop, because she was alarmed.

For a 2022 report, the Environmental Justice Foundation interviewed more than a hundred Indonesian crew members and found that roughly ninety-seven per cent had their documents confiscated or experienced debt bondage. Occasionally, workers in these conditions manage to alert authorities. In 2014, twenty-eight African workers disembarked from a Chinese squidder called the Jia De 1, which was anchored in Montevideo, and several complained of beatings on board and showed shackle marks on their ankles. Fifteen crew members were hospitalized. (The company that owned the ship did not respond to requests for comment.) In 2020, several Indonesian deckhands reportedly complained about severe beatings at sea and the presence of a man’s body in one of the ship’s freezers. An autopsy revealed that the man had sustained bruises, scarring, and a spinal injury. Indonesian authorities sentenced several manning-agency executives to more than a year in prison for labor trafficking. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

In China, these labor abuses are an open secret. A diary kept by one Chinese deckhand offers an unusually detailed glimpse into this world. In May, 2013, the deckhand paid a two-hundred-dollar recruitment fee to a manning agency, which dispatched him to a ship called the Jin Han Yu 4879. The crew were told that their first ten days or so on board would be a trial period, after which they could leave, but the ship stayed at sea for a hundred and two days. “You are slaves to work anytime and anywhere,” the deckhand wrote in his diary. Officers were served meat at mealtimes, he said, but deckhands got only bones. “The bell rings, you must be up, whether it is day, night, early morning, no matter how strong the wind, how heavy the rain, there are no Sundays and holidays.” (The company that owns the ship did not respond to requests for comment.)

The broader public in China was forced to reckon with the conditions on ships when the crew of a squid jigger called the Lu Rong Yu 2682 mutinied, in 2011. The captain, Li Chengquan, was a “big, tall, and bad-tempered man” who, according to a deckhand, gave a black eye to a worker who angered him. Rumors began circulating that the seven-thousand-dollar annual salary that they had been promised was not guaranteed. Instead, they would earn about four cents per pound of squid caught—which would amount to far less. Nine crew members took the captain hostage. In the next five weeks, the ship’s crew devolved into warring factions. Men disappeared at night, a crew member was tied up and tossed overboard, and someone sabotaged a valve on the ship, which started letting water in. The crew eventually managed to restore the ship’s communications system and transmit a distress signal, drawing two Chinese fishing vessels to their aid. Only eleven of the original thirty-three men made it back to shore. The lead mutineer and the ship’s captain were sentenced to death by the Chinese government. (The company that owns the ship did not respond to requests for comment.)

Labor trafficking has also been documented on American, South Korean, and Thai boats. But China’s fleet is arguably the worst offender, and it has done little to curb violations. Between 2018 and 2022, my team found, China gave more than seventeen million dollars in subsidies to companies where at least fifty ships seem to have engaged in fishing crimes or had deaths or injuries on board—some of which were likely the result of unsafe labor conditions. (The government declined to comment on this matter, but Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently said that the fleet operates “in accordance with laws and regulations,” and accused the U.S. of politicizing “issues that are about fisheries in the name of environmental protection and human rights.”)

Reyes, the Indonesian translator, put me in touch with Rafly Maulana Sadad, an Indonesian who, while working on the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 978 two years ago, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his back. He immediately went back to work pulling nets, then fainted, and woke up in bed. The captain refused to take him to shore, and he spent the next five months on the ship, his condition worsening. Sadad’s friends helped him eat and bathe, but he was disoriented and often lay in a pool of his own urine. “I was having difficulty speaking,” Sadad told me last year. “I felt like I’d had a stroke or something. I couldn’t really understand anything.” In August, 2021, the captain dropped Sadad off in Montevideo, and he spent nine days in the hospital, before being flown home. (Requests for comment from Rongcheng Rongyuan, which owns the ship Sadad worked on, and PT Abadi Mandiri International, his manning agency, went unanswered.) Sadad spoke to me from Indonesia, where he could walk only with crutches. “It was a very bitter life experience,” he said.

Like the boats that supply them, Chinese processing plants rely on forced labor. For the past thirty years, the North Korean government has required citizens to work in factories in Russia and China, and to put ninety per cent of their earnings—amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars—into accounts controlled by the state. Laborers are often subjected to heavy monitoring and strictly limited in their movements. U.N. sanctions ban such uses of North Korean workers, but, according to Chinese government estimates, last year as many as eighty thousand North Korean workers were living in one city in northeastern China alone. According to a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, at least four hundred and fifty of them were working in seafood plants. The Chinese government has largely scrubbed references to these workers from the Internet. But, using the search term “North Korean beauties,” my team and I found several videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, that appear to show female seafood-plant workers, most posted by gawking male employees. One Chinese commenter observed that the women “have a strong sense of national identity and are self-disciplined!” Another argued, however, that the workers have no choice but to obey orders, or “their family members will suffer.”

In the past decade, China has also overseen a crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China, setting up mass detention centers and forcing detainees to work in cotton fields, on tomato farms, and in polysilicon factories. More recently, in an effort to disrupt Uyghur communities and find cheap labor for major industries, the government has relocated millions of Uyghurs to work for companies across the country. Workers are often supervised by security guards, in dorms surrounded by barbed wire. By searching company newsletters, annual reports, and state-media stories, my team and I found that, in the past five years, thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been sent to work in seafood-processing plants. Some are subjected to “patriotic education”; in a 2021 article, local Party officials said that members of minority groups working at one seafood plant were a “typical big family” and were learning to deepen their “education of ethnic unity.” Laura Murphy, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, in the U.K., told me, “This is all part of the project to erase Uyghur culture, identities, religion, and, most certainly, their politics. The goal is the complete transformation of the entire community.” (Chinese officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Uyghur and North Korean forced labor in the nation’s seafood-processing industry.)

The U.S. has strict laws forbidding the importation of goods produced with North Korean or Uyghur labor. The use of such workers in other industries—for example, in solar-panel manufacturing—has been documented in recent years, and the U.S. has confiscated a billion dollars’ worth of imported products as a result. We found, however, that companies employing Uyghurs and North Koreans have recently exported at least forty-seven thousand tons of seafood, including some seventeen per cent of all squid sent to the U.S. Shipments went to dozens of American importers, including ones that supply military bases and public-school cafeterias. “These revelations pose a very serious problem for the entire seafood industry,” Martina Vandenberg, the founder and president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, told me.

The day of Aritonang’s death, Reyes filed a report with the Uruguayan Coast Guard, and showed officers her photographs. “They seemed pretty uninterested,” she said. The following day, a local coroner conducted an autopsy. “A situation of physical abuse emerged,” the report reads. I sent it to Weedn, the forensic pathologist, who told me that the body showed signs of violence and that untreated beriberi seems to have been the cause of death. Nicolas Potrie, who runs the Indonesian consulate in Montevideo, remembered getting a call from Mirta Morales, the prosecutor who investigated Aritonang’s case. “We need to continue trying to figure out what happened. These marks—everybody saw them,” Potrie recalled her saying. (A representative for Rongcheng Wangdao said that the company had found no evidence of misconduct on the ship: “There was nothing regarding your alleged appalling incidents about abuse, violation, insults to one’s character, physical violence or withheld salaries.” The company said that it had handed the matter over to the China Overseas Fisheries Association. Questions submitted to the association went unanswered.)

Potrie pressed for further inquiry, but none seemed forthcoming. Morales declined to share any information about the case with me. In March of 2022, I visited Aldo Braida, the president of the Chamber of Foreign Fishing Agents, which represents companies working with foreign vessels in Uruguay, at his office in Montevideo. He dismissed the accounts of mistreatment on Chinese ships that dock in the port as “fake news,” claiming, “There are a lot of lies around this.” He told me that, if crew members whose bodies were disembarked in Montevideo had suffered physical abuse, Uruguayan authorities would discover it, and that, when you put men in close quarters, fights were likely to break out. “We live in a violent society,” he said.

Uruguay has little incentive to scrutinize China further, because the country brings lucrative business to the region. In 2018, for example, a Chinese company that had bought a nearly seventy-acre plot of land west of Montevideo presented a plan to build a more than two-hundred-million-dollar “megaport.” Local media reported that the port would be a free-trade zone and include half-mile-long docks, a shipyard, a fuelling station, and seafood storage and processing facilities. The Uruguayan government had been pursuing such Chinese investment for years. The President at the time, Tabaré Vázquez, attempted to sidestep the constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote by both chambers of the General Assembly, and authorize construction of the port by executive order. “There’s so much money on the table that politicians start bending the law to grab at it,” Milko Schvartzman, a marine researcher based in Argentina, told me. But, following resistance from the public and from opposition parties, the plan was called off.

A funeral was soon held, and Aritonang was buried a few feet from his father, in a cemetery plot not far from his church. His grave marker consisted of two slats of wood joined to make a cross. That night, an official from Aritonang’s manning agency visited the family at their home to discuss what locals call a “peace agreement.” Anhar said that the family ended up accepting a settlement of some two hundred million rupiah, or roughly thirteen thousand dollars. Family members were reluctant to talk about the events on the ship. Aritonang’s brother Beben said that he didn’t want his family to get in trouble and that talking about the case might cause problems for his mother. “We, Daniel’s family, have made peace with the ship people and have let him go,” he said.

Last year, thirteen months after Aritonang’s death, I spoke again to his family by video chat. His mother, Regina Sihombing, sat on a leopard-print rug in her living room with her son Leonardo. The room had no furniture and no place to sit other than the floor. The house had undergone repairs with money from the settlement, according to the village chief; in the end, it seems, Aritonang had managed to fix up his parents’ home after all. When the conversation turned to him, his mother began to weep. “You can see how I am now,” she said. Leonardo told her, “Don’t be sad. It was his time.” ♦

This piece was produced with contributions from Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Daniel Murphy.