A fishing boat sails on the sea as the summer fishing moratorium ended in Xincun Township in south China's Hainan Province, Aug. 16, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)

Following the official end of the three-and-a-half-month fishing moratorium on Sunday at noon, hundreds of thousands of fishing boats from the provinces of Hainan, Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Guangxi are expected to sail out to sea and start their busy fishing season in the coming days.

However, media outlets including Japan-based Kyodo News and the South China Morning Post took the opportunity to claim that China lifting the fishing ban may risk further tensions and that Chinese fishermen were told not to fish in "sensitive zones."

Analysts reached by the Global Times said the fishing moratorium is a routine practice to protect maritime fishery resources and has nothing to do with geopolitics. 

As for whether the beginning of a new fishing season would ignite tensions, observers say Chinese fishery departments have been adopting a cautious attitude in managing fishermen, telling them not to deliberately enter sensitive water zones to provoke confrontations, and fishermen have been well-behaved in this regard. 

Experts believe lifting fishing bans has nothing to do with regional security — instead, maritime regional tensions depend on whether some countries abuse their power in law enforcement and provoke tensions when territorial boundaries remain controversial.

China has enforced an annual fishing ban since 1995, with the aim of protecting the maritime ecosystem and biodiversity from excessive fishing. The fishing moratorium in the South China Sea and East China Sea that started on May 1 this year was widely considered as the toughest in history. 

Zhang Jun, a 48-year-old fisherman in Shishi, a coastal city in East China's Fujian Province, told the Global Times that small boats have set sail since August 1 and medium-sized or large boats began fishing on Sunday at noon, when the ban officially ended.

Fishermen told the Global Times that local fishery management authorities notified them not to sail into restricted areas such as waters near the Diaoyu Islands and the island of Taiwan. 

"We were told not to cross a line in the middle of the Taiwan Straits," Zhang said. As the distance between Fujian Province and the island of Taiwan is very close (about 110 nautical miles or 204 kilometers), many fishermen said they will observe the government's rules and some turned to waters nearby Guangdong Province. 

A government official in the fishery department of Fuzhou, Fujian told the Global Times on Monday that the notice against fishing in sensitive areas is a normal and routine regulation. Fishermen are fully aware of and obey the rules, and they won't deliberately cause trouble.

According to local fishermen, some of them were previously detained by officers in the island of Taiwan and had their equipment confiscated with fines of around 500,000 yuan ($72,050). Their boats were equipped with positioning systems that would send a warning to local management offices if they went into restricted areas. 

"Local officials will inform us by phone or radar system. If somebody refused to obey, they would be punished once they returned," a fisherman said, noting that the policy is not new. 

The sovereignty of the Diaoyu Islands belongs to China, and it cannot be comprised. China has been dedicated to keeping regional peace by telling fishermen not to travel to sensitive areas, which reflects China's responsible manner of keeping regional peace, Chen Xiangmiao, an assistant research fellow at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, told the Global Times. 

Chen said it is a legal act for Chinese coast guard vessels to patrol in the territorial waters of the Diaoyu Islands for law enforcement purposes, warning Japanese vessels to stop intruding, inciting regional disturbances and harming China-Japan ties. 

The task of preventing fishery conflicts and accidents is important to avoid regional conflicts, when maritime delimitations with other countries remain unsolved. Foreign law enforcement departments should take a "civilized" approach in handling possible regional conflicts, Cao Qun, a research fellow from the Center for Maritime Security and Cooperation at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Monday. 

Global Times reporters found a statement released by the Marine and Fisheries Bureau of Dongshan county, Fujian Province in March 2019, which urged local fishermen not to enter the contiguous zone and territorial sea of the Diaoyu Islands and operate within 30 nautical miles of the baseline of the territorial sea of the Diaoyu Islands. The statement also requested them not to operate in restricted or prohibited waters declared by the Taiwan authorities. 

To better guide boats in maritime fishing, the statement said that local authorities could use the Beidou maritime satellite telephone to warn fishing boats and persuade them to leave in real-time tracking.