Chinese Fishing Activity in India’s EEZ: 67 Days of Zero, and What a Year of Data Shows

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Chinese distant-water fishing near India is a recurring flashpoint in Indo-Pacific maritime security discussions. The public conversation usually runs on anecdote: a sighting here, a diplomatic protest there.

A full 12-month behavioral lookback analysis conducted by Windward’s Maritime Intelligence Opertations Center (MIOC), covering slow-speed (likely fishing) activity inside India’s EEZ through August 7, 2026, shows a picture that is both quieter and more specific than the anecdotes suggest.

The Current Window: 67 Days of Nothing

The most striking finding is the most recent one. There have been zero China-flagged standing events inside India’s EEZ since May 31, 2026 — 67 consecutive days covering the entire 30–60 day window of interest.

The only China-linked activity detected in that window is a single Mongolia-flagged vessel. Windward assesses this is almost certainly a scrapping arrival at Alang, not fishing.

A hard stop after a year of activity is itself a signal. Whether it reflects seasonal redeployment, monsoon conditions, or a deliberate pullback is a question for the next 60 days of data, but the baseline is now unambiguous.

Reading the Year: Two Surges, One Artifact

Across the full 12-month file, Windward recorded 871 raw slow-speed events. Raw event counts are where most analysis stops, and where most analysis goes wrong.

The real fleet event was September 2025: 164 events across 68 separate vessels, spread across both the Andaman and Nicobar approaches and the Arabian Sea. That is what a coordinated fleet presence looks like. Many hulls, wide geography.

May 2026 appears larger at 564 events, but the number is an artefact of concentration. One hull supplies 473 of those events, and 412 of them fall on a single day as re-detections of one continuous 11-hour episode. Strip that vessel out and May is 91 events across 42 vessels. Meaningful, but not a surge.

Corrected for re-detections, the full year’s 871 raw events collapse to 210 vessel-days. That is the defensible number for any assessment of Chinese fishing pressure on India’s EEZ.

The Transshipment Pattern: How a Fishing Vessel Stays at Sea for a Year

Dark activity — the go-to indicator for deceptive behavior — is nearly absent here. Only two Chinese fishing vessels performed dark activities in the area in the past six months.

The behavior that warrants attention is at-sea resupply. Windward tracked a Chinese fishing vessel and a Chinese reefer conducting repeated meetings just off the Indian EEZ: 13 meetings since the beginning of 2025. One ship-to-ship engagement lasted 11 hours, consistent with a fish transfer designed to keep the fishing vessel on station.

The fishing vessel’s port call history confirms the model. Three recorded port calls in the past year: Longmen, China (17 days), Taizhou, China (2 days), and Haoyou Shipyard, China. Roughly a year between port visits. Transshipment is what makes that possible, and it is what makes catch volumes invisible to any port-based inspection regime.

Flag vs. Ownership: Two Different Maps

The geography splits along a line that matters for IUU assessment.

China-flagged fishing vessels operated across the entire Indian EEZ over the past year, including inner areas close to shore. China company-owned or managed vessels — hulls flying other flags — concentrated mainly at the EEZ edges. Windward assesses this edge-hugging pattern is consistent with non-approved fishing activity: vessels working the boundary where jurisdiction is hardest to enforce and attribution is hardest to make.

This is precisely the gap flag-based screening cannot close. A vessel’s flag says who registered it; ownership and behavioral data say who directs it and what it is doing.

What to Watch

The 67-day stop resets the baseline. The indicators that matter now:

• Whether the Fu Yuan Yu, Xing Bang, and Lu Rong Yuan Yu groups return after the current pause, and where they re-enter.
• Continued reefer meetings off the EEZ line — the resupply pattern persists even when in-zone activity stops.
• Dwell-time outliers over event-count spikes. The vessels loitering 19–30 hours are the ones worth tasking against.

For agencies responsible for monitoring India’s EEZ, the data supports a shift from area surveillance to targeted vessel tracking. The actors are known, few, and behaviorally consistent.

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