---
title: "SA helps feed China’s huge desert fish-farming boom"
description: "As China turns desert groundwater into fish farms in Xinjiang, South Africa’s sardines and anchovies are contributing to this ‘Blue Miracle’ – revealing how modern aquaculture shifts its costs across oceans, ecosystems and people."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "OUTLAW OCEAN PROJECT"
author: "Ian Urbina"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/ian-urbina/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-09-sa-helps-feed-chinas-huge-desert-fish-farming-boom/"
published: "2026-10-09T17:06:27"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 6263
---

# SA helps feed China’s huge desert fish-farming boom

> As China turns desert groundwater into fish farms in Xinjiang, South Africa’s sardines and anchovies are contributing to this ‘Blue Miracle’ – revealing how modern aquaculture shifts its costs across oceans, ecosystems and people.

By Ian Urbina · Published 9 October 2026, 19:06 SAST

## Key points
- China is turning brackish groundwater beneath Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert into a booming seafood industry, with more than 1,000 fish farms producing salmon, shrimp, crab and oysters.
- Beijing hails the “Blue Miracle” as a food-security triumph — but the expansion is tied to coercive population transfers, alleged forced labour and a heavy state propaganda campaign.
- The desert farms may recycle their water, yet they still depend on fishmeal made from wild sardines and anchovies — including millions of dollars’ worth supplied by South Africa.
- The result is a global aquaculture paradox: fish farming promises to ease pressure on the oceans while its feed demands intensify overfishing, pollution and the exploitation of vulnerable communities.

## Content

China’s Xinjiang region, on the country’s far northwest frontier, is a land of unforgiving extremes. At Xinjiang’s southwest border stands K2, the second-highest mountain in the world at 28,251 feet (8,610.9m). Nearly 100 climbers have died trying to reach K2’s summit, making attempts to scale it far more deadly than those to reach the top of Mount Everest.

The Karakoram Range, where K2 is situated, is just one of four major ranges abutting, slicing through or ringing Xinjiang. The Kunlun runs along the province’s southeastern border; the Altai is found in Xinjiang’s northern reaches, and the Tian Shan spans its centre. Together, the mountains, while breathtaking to look at, work to keep much of Xinjiang starved of moisture. Barely six inches of rain fall every year across Xinjiang’s 600,000 square miles.

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 (183m), taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The desert is credited with having buried 20 different cities over the ages, and it has come to be called a variety of grim names. “The Land of Ruins” is one of them. “The Sea of Death” is another.

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. 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. Within days, two members of the party were dead. The ones who did make it across drank chicken blood and camel urine to survive.

Less than 10% of Xinjiang, then, has ever been fit for human habitation. Those who have eked out an existence have mostly 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. Historically, Xinjiang’s native populations have included Turkic Uyghurs, Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Mongols and Tajiks.

Central Chinese authorities were long content to regard Xinjiang as a remote and rugged strategic buffer against an outside threat from the West. 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.

Beginning in the 1950s, 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 programmes yet seen. Xinjiang became the western anchor of what was called the West-East Gas Pipeline, a monumental project that sends natural gas over 3,862km to cities such as Shanghai.

At the same time, the state re-engineered the Tarim River, Xinjiang’s longest, in a bid to turn the province’s hard and dry soil into farmable land. Reservoirs were built on the Tarim’s tributaries; diversion gates measured and allocated flow, and lined canals carried water to what would become newly levelled farmland. 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 jump-start the growing of a range of crops in Xinjiang, including an aggressive push to plant and harvest cotton.

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. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) would handle that feat of reinvention. 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 convert herdsmen into farmers. Land was seized, training programmes 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.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3663?aid=2997415)

*Troops from the People’s Liberation Army entered Xinjiang in 1949. Demobilised troops became part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, established under a directive to “cultivate and guard border areas” in 1954. (Credit: VideoChinaTV, Channel 4)*

The company’s record of coercive tactics in Xinjiang has earned it a notorious international reputation. Over the past decade, the XPCC has seized more than half a million acres in Xinjiang to use for growing cotton, as well as for a variety of other industries, from fruit farming to solar fields. The company has also helped the government relocate more than 10% of Xinjiang’s population – more than 2.5 million people each year between 2014 and 2019 – through labour transfers. If brutal, the XPCC’s work in Xinjiang has been effective. Today, Xinjiang produces roughly 20% of the world’s cotton supply and is a major source of export crops such as tomatoes, lavender and wine grapes.

![In recent years, China has pushed fish farming into its arid and high-altitude far west, particularly in Xinjiang and across the Tibetan Plateau. This map highlights more than 1,000 of these farms and provides access to a national database of over 63,000 sites. (Map: The Outlaw Ocean Project)](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/mrwOA0RJ7z8146QSa1rzptSNyes=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2998/OutlawOcean-BlueMiraclewesternmap_165025.jpg)

Of all the successes in Xinjiang over the past 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.

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. Researchers knew that the Taklamakan had once been entirely underwater, connected to one of Earth’s oceans. The desert’s sand and soil were littered with ancient coral fragments, microscopic plankton, bivalves and gastropods. The Taklamakan’s salty soil, in fact, helped explain why some of the world’s best-preserved mummies had been unearthed there.

The aquifers found beneath Xinjiang’s arid vastness would eventually be mapped, and tests would be done on the discovered water – to see both how pressurised and just how salty the water was. 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. The joke didn’t last. Chinese scientists eventually realised that the underground waters in Xinjiang could be adjusted to mimic seawater.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3667?aid=2997415)

*Qiemo County Shishixian Aquatic Products built a roughly eight-acre fish farm on the southeastern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in March 2024. Today, the farm raises golden pomfret, grouper and mullet in two outdoor ponds and an indoor greenhouse with 68 tanks.**(**Credit: Xinhua)*

As a result, more than 1,000 fish farms now dot Xinjiang, producing about 200,000 tonnes of seafood annually. Salmon, lobster, bass, carp, crab, shrimp – all of them and more raised in Xinjiang. Chinese media call it the “Blue Miracle”, a maritime economy in a frontier home to what is known as the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility. The [Outlaw Ocean Project](https://theoutlawocean.com/), a news organisation in Washington, DC, mapped these farms as part of a sweeping [investigation](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/) showing how much seafood is reaching the US, including government facilities, in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).

“Raising fish in the desert?” China’s state broadcaster CCTV wrote in a 2025 article. “It sounds impossible, but in Xinjiang, it’s becoming a reality.”

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3666?aid=2997415)

*Workers at Ili Yueran Ecological Agriculture, which raises shrimp and carp on a 60-acre fish farm in western Xinjiang, stocked their ponds in March 2026. The company began operations in 2015, when, as part of a broader ‘Aid to Xinjiang’ programme, local officials invited experts from coastal provinces to provide resources and guidance in aquaculture. (Credit: Yili Yueran Ecological Agriculture on Douyin)*

The spectacle of fish being raised in the Xinjiang desert is another sign of how fully seafood has entered a global, engineered economy, in which species once bound to particular waters can be produced far from them and sold into the same border-crossing market. In 2025, South Africa imported more than $30-million worth of seafood from China.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3668?aid=2997415)

*In northern Xinjiang, villagers received cash payments from Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture at annual profit distribution ceremonies, which began in 2017. Villagers received interest-free loans to invest in a company subsidiary, and each year, Tianyun paid investors a percentage of their initial pay-in. In total, Tianyun has paid out about $1-million. (Credit: CCTV, Xinjiang Tianyun)*

### Global phenomenon

The notion of fish farming dates back millennia, and began humbly enough. Storms would wash fish ashore, stranding them in ponds and other small bodies of inland water. Rather than simply catching and eating them, people found ways to feed them and allow them to multiply. Researchers believe that no later than 475 BCE, China was far enough along in the practice to have assembled a manual on how best to carry it off. The manual laid out ideal water levels to keep and guidance on how to harvest the fish without draining the ponds. Carp was the dominant subject of China’s efforts. They bred often, did not eat their own, grew quickly – and tasted quite good.

China was hardly alone. Ancient Egyptians raised tilapia in ponds off the Nile River. Roman engineers cultivated oysters in tidal lagoons. The appeal, of course, was straightforward. Fish are a vital source of protein for the diets of any population. 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 the world consumes now comes from aquaculture rather than wild catch. India alone produces about 11 million metric tonnes of farmed fish products every year. 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. In a 2019 report, the Nature Conservancy argued that by 2050, sustainably managed fish farms should become humanity’s primary source of seafood.

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. 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 benefits. In India, it is a major source of employment, particularly for women. In Bangladesh, the expansion of fish farming has helped drive down prices, making seafood more affordable for poorer households. The industry, even accounting for transporting the farmed fish around the world, is a far smaller source of carbon emissions than beef or pork.

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. The Chinese have built “aquaculture ships”, huge vessels sent to sea with 15 breeding cabins capable of holding 90,000 cubic metres of water.

In Scotland, underwater robots are used to combat the threat of sea lice, a parasite that feeds on salmon. 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 smartphone apps to manage timed, more cost-effective feeding schedules at their ponds.

And then there is the engineering of the fish themselves. In the US, the seafood company AquAdvantage has won approval to raise cloned salmon. Fish farming, therefore, isn’t only about cages, pumps and sensors anymore. It’s also about rewriting 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. In shallow coastal pens, solid waste settles into thick sludge on the seafloor, smothering plants and animals. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus fuel algal blooms, kill wild fish and drive away beachgoers. Fish bred to grow faster and larger sometimes escape, threatening native species.

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 fish stocks in the oceans. More than 80% of the wild fish stocks have collapsed or are being harvested beyond safe biological limits. But what farmed fish eat is other fish, many of them drawn from those same depleted stocks.

### Desert bonanza

On 25 July 2021, at an outdoor theatre 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.

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 centre, a processing plant, a cold-storage facility and many salmon ponds, some measuring more than 45m across. The company sells roughly $30-million worth of seafood annually, producing more than 6,000 tonnes of fish a year and about 40% of China’s domestically produced salmon.

![Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture signed a letter of intent for 999 million yuan in sales (about $140-million) with Dalian Rich Enterprise Group in 2022. Dalian Rich sells frozen salmon to seafood processing companies in the US, Canada and Europe under various brands. (Photo: Yili Zero Distance)](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/OnySh6ys1TLw1qFr7zE0Cm-9PSY=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2998/OutlawOcean-BlueMiracle1_162220.jpg)

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. Tianyun has generated jobs, certainly, 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. “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. That July day, with music playing from speakers near the outdoor theatre stage, state television was there to capture the moment.

“There’s a real joy in counting money,” the CCTV reporter said breathlessly.

![Workers package farmed fish at Tianyun’s processing facility, Xinjiang Zungui Fresh Food Technology, which produces about 3,000 tonnes of fish annually and received approval to export fishery products to the European Union in 2023. (Photo: Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture)](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/A3gbTI89t2D0bTDZjWv4RXZXd6c=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2998/OutlawOcean-BlueMiracle3_616001.jpg)

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. 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. 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”.

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. 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 transformed into aquaculture zones. By 2014, aquaculture installations dotted more than 30% of China’s shoreline.

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% between 1984 and 2014. 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 (about 302 billion litres) of wastewater – containing faeces, excess feed, dead fish and aquaculture drugs – were being discharged annually. This pollution has degraded critical waterways, including the Yangtze River, which supplies freshwater to Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta, which supplies Hong Kong. “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 2014, citing “unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable development”.

In response, Beijing moved to restructure the aquaculture industry. Officials called for reducing aquaculture in overcrowded coastal waters and expanding it inland. Within two years, authorities had removed roughly 300,000 coastal farming cages. 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.

Converting the native populations of Xinjiang into eager and intrepid fishermen, Beijing realised, was going to be a challenge. The government had warned of the alleged “idleness” of Xinjiang’s people, publishing formal critiques stating that if they were not enlisted in a structured economic enterprise, they would spend their time gambling, partaking in lavish weddings or funerals, and engaging in “illegal religious and feudal superstitious activities”.

“If we do not occupy the ideological and cultural positions in rural areas, they will be occupied by others,” Tang Renjian, the then head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, wrote in 2021.

Of course, Beijing had demonstrated its willingness 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.

More than a million people were 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. By the end of 2024, the XPCC, Beijing’s muscle, partially or fully ran at least 50 fish farms in Xinjiang that collectively produced more than $290-million worth of seafood.

In northern Xinjiang, where the Tianyun company is headquartered, the largest ethnic group is the Kazakhs, a people who had practised nomadic pastoralism for ages. Tianyun partnered with a government-affiliated rural credit union to provide interest-free loans – typically about 10,000 yuan, or $1,500 – to hundreds of local residents, allowing them to buy shares in a subsidiary that would support the fish farm through tasks like labour contracting and sales.

Collectively, these households funded almost half of the subsidiary’s start-up capital. In return, each household received fixed annual payments for several years, followed by dividends as a percentage of their initial pay-in. Villagers were also offered paid work operating equipment or harvesting fish.

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. Another video featured an interview with a local man, Alalebai, who in 2014 was a sheep herder in the village of Jiaertuohan. “Life was difficult,” he later told a local news outlet. “When I went out to herd, I didn’t dare close my eyes for more than 10 hours in a row, for fear of losing the sheep.”

In 2017, Tianyun, working with a state-run poverty-alleviation programme, 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. Zhang Xiu, the company’s chairperson, 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. “After my husband gained a stable job, our life changed tremendously,” his wife said. “This was all provided by the party and the government.” By 2023, Tianyun had bought about 100 homes in and around Kalasu Township for other employees.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3669?aid=2997415)

*Wusiban Alalebai, an employee of Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture, gave a tour of his new house in Kalasu Township during a television segment in 2020. ‘This was all provided by the party and the government,’ his wife said. (Credit: Xinjiang Satellite TV)*

A second, more recent government film shot mostly at Tianyun, titled “Land of Hope”, had a rougher edge. It tells the story of a fledgling fish farm and the local man, Qairat, behind it. He meets resistance from his neighbours, who fear chemicals used in fish farming might kill their cows and sheep. “Is this little bastard Qairat trying to wipe us all out?” one villager shouts.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3671?aid=2997415)

*‘Land of Hope,’ a short film about a fledgling fish farm in Xinjiang, was posted to a Chinese government account on WeChat on 12 May 2024. Drawing on the ‘viral online buzz’ around Xinjiang seafood, the post wrote, this film would showcase the ‘captivating transformation’ of farming fish in the desert. The movie was part of a broader state campaign celebrating the rapid growth of Xinjiang aquaculture, especially as a tool for economic development and social stabilisation in China’s far-inland west. (Credit: Xinjiang Public Security Department on WeChat)*

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?”

![Caption: The chairman of Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture, Zhang Xiu, handed platters of cash to villagers as part of the company’s annual profit distribution ceremony, which began in 2017. (Photo: Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture)](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/vTDMXncsLYeFFJoI4TUAQBTnJK0=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2998/OutlawOcean-BlueMiracle4_100155.jpg)

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 behaviour during a two-year probation. 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. (Seafood is not native to the region’s cuisine; in 2023, Xinjiang residents consumed roughly six pounds, or about 2.7kg, of seafood per person – less than a fifth of the national average.) Teased by the others, Duman agrees to try some salmon. Qairat drapes an arm around his shoulders.

“Our hometown has vast waters suitable for aquaculture,” Qairat says. An elder rises, slaps a stack of cash on the table, and declares: “To save our hometown, I’ll be the first to invest.”

[Tianyun](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/discussion/45ea60f1-dd3a-49dc-92a5-22d5a55ec852) said in a statement that claims of systemic forced labour “are completely factually unfounded” and described the UFLPA as an unreasonable and politically motivated framework that violates the principles of fair international trade. Tianyun strictly abides by China’s laws on labour 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 labour,” Tianyun said. “On the contrary, we provide competitive compensation, comprehensive occupational health and safety protections, and career development opportunities.” The [XPCC](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/discussion/0076841d-bb9c-4102-a5cf-080e84492fe2) did not respond to a request for comment.

### A huge feeding problem

The Shishixian fish farm sits on the southeastern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Built in just three months beginning in March 2024, the roughly eight-acre site was carved out of the Taklamakan’s dunes.

The Taklamakan remains a place of wonder and menace, marked by searing heat and arctic chill, sometimes both inside the same 24 hours. In 2019, a storm gathered along its eastern side. Air cooled and made dense by the rain slammed into the desert floor. The wind then raced sideways, bulldozing sand and dust into the sky in what is called a “haboob”, a wall hundreds of feet tall. The wall was so vast that it kicked up a haze the colour of tea, visible from space, that blanketed more than 320km of China, leading to school closures, traffic disruptions and the cancellation of all flights to and from Qiemo Airport in southern Xinjiang.

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. 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, thereby creating a massive fence to stunt their growth and disrupt sandstorms. The trees were also meant to protect a 2,700km rail line that the government finished in 2022, which fully encircles the Taklamakan. That rail line now serves more than 10 million people across southern Xinjiang.

To create fish farms in the Taklamakan, bulldozers flattened and compacted the sand before engineers tapped shallow wells – about 1.8m deep – of brackish groundwater. Lined ponds were created and filled, and technicians seeded them with specialised microorganisms, adjusting the water’s chemistry to something closer to seawater, and thus effectively transforming desert groundwater into a marine environment.

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 4.8m in diameter, arranged in rows beneath plastic sheeting. 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. Pond water, kept between 20°C and 30°C, runs on a near full-recirculation model, whereby it is filtered and reused rather than discharged into the surrounding sand. Against a backdrop of dunes, the farm raises grouper, mullet, sillago and millions of pearl-bivalve and oyster seedlings. The farm did not respond to a [request](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/discussion/ba066c59-c2c4-4bb1-b1eb-e20359e95da1) for comment.

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, and perhaps its most memorable one. But 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% of the industry’s operating budgets. The only commercially viable option at scale remains fishmeal: a pulverised, 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. 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.

Every year, South Africa supplies millions of dollars worth of fishmeal and fish oil that help sustain aquaculture far from its own shores. 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. 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 the fishmeal industry targets are the very populations relied on for basic sustenance in poorer countries. Much of the fish destined for fishmeal processing comes from Peru, Mauritania, Vietnam and Thailand. The environmental impact of fishmeal production – its waste fouls clean waterways; its stench blankets entire communities – is considerable, as well. 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. Global fishmeal consumption, as a result, is projected to rise nearly 10% between 2022 and 2032, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

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% of China’s coastal catch consisted of these species. The pressure proved unsustainable. Of 15 fish species assessed in a 2019 Frontiers in Marine Science study, 11 were overfished, depleted or outside safe biological limits – five of them forage fish. To ease the strain, China cut its near-shore fleet by roughly 40,000 vessels in 2020 and increasingly turned to imported fishmeal. Today, China imports more than 40% of the world’s fishmeal, a share projected to rise to 55% by 2032, according to a 2023 UN report.

Nearly 10% of the fishmeal exported by South Africa in 2025 went towards Chinese fish farms. “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. Fish, marked up and sold as salmon, are actually rainbow trout. What’s labelled cod is often, rather, pollock. Online, local *Chinese consumers have not infrequently called out the scams.*

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3665?aid=2997415)

*In 2023, an Outlaw Ocean Project investigation revealed that the Chinese government was forcing thousands of workers from the province of Xinjiang to work in seafood processing plants supplying many of the major grocery stores and restaurants across the US and Europe. (Credit: The Outlaw Ocean Project)*

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. “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.

Chinese companies have sought help from seafood quality-assurance outfits in reassuring the public – its own citizens and consumers worldwide – that forced labour and or dangerous amounts of antibiotics weren’t used in the production of its farmed fish. Those organisations, Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) among the most prominent, claim they are independent entities with exacting standards. But many researchers and ocean-sustainability advocates regard BAP and similar firms as unable or disinclined to root out real problems. 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 labour, environmental or human rights abuses.

And so, with increasing frequency, investigators have found illegal quantities 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.

In a May 2024 open letter, more than 70 environmental, animal welfare and community organisations accused BAP of “greenwashing”, arguing that certified farms are “rarely, if ever, held to account for adverse outcomes” tied to their operations. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council, the other major global certification body, announced in 2024 that it would withdraw from China. While financial considerations were cited, industry reporting linked the decision to an investigation documenting the widespread use of state-sponsored forced labour involving Uyghur and North Korean workers in Chinese seafood-processing plants.

### Banging the Xinjiang drum

China’s efforts to sell the world on its fish farmed in Xinjiang have gone well beyond touting certifications by supposedly independent monitors. There is, after all, much at stake – feeding its own people first of all. 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”.

And then there is the exploding market for seafood. Tianyun, the state’s favoured company in northern Xinjiang, exports its farmed seafood products to more than a dozen countries, according to [Bait to Plate](https://baittoplate.theoutlawocean.com/?preview_bypass=2a9c8b1e-5c3d-4f0e-9c7a-1b2d3e4f5g6h), an online tool that tracks the fishing and seafood industries. “Tianyun’s salmon products will be exported to all parts of the world,” Zhang Yuru, the company’s deputy general manager, said in 2024. The firm is also branching into salmon collagen peptide drinks and peptide tablets – protein supplements marketed as slowing the ageing of skin and joints.

In Xinjiang today, a fledgling tourism business has grown up around the region’s fish farming success. At a fish farm run by the Xinjiang Saihu Fishery Technology Development company, there is actually what the company hails as a fish-farming theme park. It features a museum and a restaurant that serves Sichuan pepper whitefish, whitefish sashimi and caviar. “You can catch fish on site, weigh them and take them to the town restaurant for processing,” wrote one happy visitor in 2025 on Dianping, a Chinese website similar to Yelp. The company has also invited professional caviar makers from Finland to visit every year to teach its workers how to make caviar. Xinjiang Saihu did not respond to a [request](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/discussion/9d469759-712f-4981-bcd9-b73139e548ef) for comment.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3670?aid=2997415)

*Xinjiang Saihu Fisheries Technology Development loaded shipments of whitefish roe consigned to Finland onto a truck in October 2021. Saihu Fisheries is one of three Xinjiang companies, along with Tianyun and its subsidiary, approved to export fishery products into the European Union. (Credit: Bortala Daily)*

The Chinese have also organised 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.

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. These videos were subsequently amplified by media outlets affiliated with the XPCC, as well as on state-run channels on YouTube and Facebook. Melissa’s video, like many circulating during the Xinjiang seafood campaign, included footage from Tianyun.

[Media](https://api.dailymaverick.co.za/embed/3672?aid=2997415)

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 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”.

“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.”

Beijing presents Xinjiang’s aquaculture boom as proof that technology can conquer geography. 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 narrative about how modern food systems displace their burdens: drawing feed from distant seas, labour from vulnerable populations and trust from consumers asked to believe that abundance can be manufactured without meaningful sacrifice somewhere else. **DM**

*The reporting for this story was part of a larger*[*investigation*](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com)*conducted by an international*[*team of journalists*](https://foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com/contributors)*based at The Outlaw Ocean Project.*