China is the world’s biggest fishing nation and a major player in the global seafood trade. Its fisheries development can decisively influence the global seafood trade, food security and marine conservation. In recent years, significant changes have taken place in China’s fisheries management priorities, policies and regulations. In this paper, we review the evolving fisheries management practices in China to delineate changes in the management policies, methods and their performances from 1949 to 2019. We determined that the following issues impede the development, implementation and enforcement of fisheries policies and regulations, namely the large size of the fishing fleet, large and poorly organized fisheries population, the “hidden” fishing capacity, uniform management approaches that sometimes fail to account for local conditions, lack of clearly defined and allocated fishing rights, limited data quality and availability, insufficient fisheries monitoring programmes, absence of a robust scientific input framework and insufficient stakeholder involvement. Combining those problems with China’s current management initiatives, we propose recommendations for China’s future fisheries reforms. We hope this paper can inform China’s marine fisheries policies and provide valuable references for further researches related to China’s sustainable fisheries management.
Developing fisheries policies based on the best available science (BAS) has been generally required in international agreements and national legal documents in many countries. However, it is difficult to comply with BAS when lacking a uniformly agreed‐upon operational framework. In this study, we conducted an exhaustive literature review and developed a framework that includes a comprehensive set of criteria and a basic operational structure for science‐based fisheries management (SBFM) to better integrate BAS in fisheries policies. We proposed that SBFM consists of four components: objective‐setting, data input (implementation and enforcement process), data production (scientific research process), and data use (management strategy development). The capacity of a fisheries system to produce and use BAS is mainly reflected in the following areas: (a) efficient informational feedback among these components; (b) collecting a good range of quality‐assured data that meet the needs of scientific research and fishery policy formulation; (c) analyzing the collected data; and (d) selecting and using the best data from different sources. The framework developed provides a set of new patterns for the use of fisheries science, which is applied for management purposes. It can inform the creation, evaluation, and improvement of management systems rooted in SBFM and strengthen SBFM‐related research, communication, and cooperation.
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