From Sea to Market: The Imperial Pelagic Regime and China’s Blue Frontier of Capital Accumulation

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 12. Political Economy

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in the Zhoushan Islands of China between 2019 and 2025, and combined with Historical Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA), this study contributes to post-neoliberal food regime scholarship. It examines the role of nation states and state-capital hybrids in shaping the global distribution of agrifood and marine resources. Through empirical case studies, this dissertation research analyzes China’s expanding pelagic regime. This regime is centered on heavily subsidized distant-water fisheries and technology-driven deep-sea aquaculture as primary mechanisms of marine resource grabbing. Together with the expanding onshore seafood and marine resource processing industry, these developments comprise China’s broader seafood regime. Specifically, this study demonstrates how China “cultivates the sea” and constructs new blue frontiers of capital accumulation. It does so through intensified extraction of marine resources and energy on the high seas, which are then supplied to onshore processing industry and markets. Guided by China’s Maritime Power Strategy, Food Security agenda, and the Belt and Road initiative, the analysis highlights the politics of export-oriented seafood processing. It also reveals who benefits and who is further marginalized in China’s marine economic upgrading process. Furthermore, this study offers a snapshot of a China-centered global seafood regime and examines its influence on marine governance and risk management through China’s regulatory model, including responses to nuclear wastewater pollution. The analysis highlights the interplay of bilateral cooperation and strategic competition among public actors, private capital, and state-capital hybrids. In doing so, it shows how this overlapping power configurations unfold within the broader context of climate change, where environmental risk, geopolitical tension, and capital accumulation mutually reinforce one another, thereby deepening global inequalities and intensifying ecological tensions.

Author

• Yue Xu, Colorado State University