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Sociology of Agriculture and Food (SAFRIG)

From Grain to Sea: China’s Seafood Regime and Blue Frontier of Accumulation Yue Xu*, Yue Xu,

Drawing on ethnographic work and interviews conducted in the Zhoushan Islands, China between 2019 and 2025, this study adopts a food regime approach to examine the production sphere of China’s seafood regime, focusing on two primary modes of resource extraction: distant-water fisheries and aquaculture. Using distant-water fisheries and marine ranching as cases, the study demonstrates how China’s expanding pelagic imperial regime creates new frontiers of accumulation through displacing small-scale capture fishers, restructuring coastal livelihoods, promoting industrial upgrading, and intensifying resource grabbing in the high seas and ecologically sensitive Antarctic waters. Through aquaculture, this study traces the circulation of land- and marine-based feed resources within China’s seafood regime, highlighting how these flows are shaped by policy, declining fisheries stocks, and rising global competition. Taken together, these cases show how China’s seafood regime extends new frontiers of accumulation at sea under the banner of China’s Maritime Power Strategy and Food Security agenda. The study contributes to scholarship on the post-neoliberal food regime by offering empirical insight into how state capitalism and hybrid state-capital formations reconfigure agrifood resource distribution and advance neo-extractivism globally.