A Chinese government-funded research program is backing what it has termed a “key special project” to test the effectiveness of new lighting used to draw squid to the country’s trawlers.
Titled “Intelligent Equipment and Technology for High-Quality Fishing in Ocean Light-Attracted Fisheries,” the research program is being delivered by staff at Shanghai Ocean University under China’s National Key R&D Program: Science and Technology Innovation in Marine Agriculture and Freshwater Fisheries. That program is funded by the central government with the goal of helping China surpass its competitors in key industries.
As part of the new research project, staff from the university's Offshore Fisheries Science and Technology Innovation Team recently installed AI-driven light intensity measurement devices on several squid jigger boats.
One of the vessels being used to trial the equipment is the Zhouyu 968 which is currently operating in the North Pacific and owned by state-run China Aquatic Products Zhoushan Marine Fisheries Corp (often known as ZhouYu).
The research project on squid trawlers’ lights has been described by Shanghai Ocean as “a solid step forward in my country's light-attracted fisheries towards intelligence and informatization,” and will allow fishing companies to monitor in real time the illumination levels on all their vessels.
Squid is the top catch for China’s enormous distant water fleet, which has sought to build its share of the lucrative E.U. market while also building up dominance of the global squid processing sector through subsidies paid to encourage fishing firms to land their catch in ports like Zhoushan for processing.
China’s fishing sector may benefit from a massive focus on R&D across the Chinese economy, which is part of Beijing’s effort to become a dominant industrial player. A recent OECD report showed that the growth of China’s R&D spending has outpaced that of other major economies: at 8.7 percent, growth in R&D expenditure in China in 2023 surpassed that of the OECD area, the United States (1.7 percent) and the European Union (1.6 percent). However, both the U.S. and Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, spend more as a percentage of GDP on R&D than China does, per the OECD.
