If this had not been published by an official state media outlet, no rational observer would believe that such a widespread and systematic practice was unfolding in the world’s second-largest economy—in the year 2024, no less.
On December 16, 2024, People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, ran a commentary titled “The Black Hand of ‘Deep-Sea Fishing’ Must Be Severed.” The peculiar phrase “deep-sea fishing” was not a term of art but an attempt—under China’s draconian censorship regime—to describe something far more sinister. The article itself defines it: “deep-sea fishing” refers to the illegal cross-regional abduction of private entrepreneurs, the freezing, seizure, and even outright transfer of corporate and personal assets by authorities from outside their jurisdiction.
To put it plainly: this is a euphemism for police from one region venturing into another to kidnap business owners, fabricate charges, and expropriate their wealth. How brazen is this practice? In any country that even pretends to adhere to the rule of law, the confiscation of corporate property must be grounded in a judicial verdict. In China, however, amid these so-called “deep-sea fishing” operations, entrepreneurs find themselves abducted and presented with a crude ultimatum: their families must produce a sum of money, or else their businesses will be targeted for investigation and destruction. Those who comply with this extortion—essentially paying a ransom—are then “helped” by the authorities, who suddenly find reason to drop all charges.
I understand that this sounds preposterous. Why don’t these business owners, once released, take legal action? If the police are complicit, what about the prosecutors? The courts? How is any of this even possible? Were these entrepreneurs actually guilty of anything? Is this just an isolated aberration?
It is difficult to believe—but let us examine it in detail.
1. Deep-Sea Fishing
First, is this merely an extreme and isolated phenomenon in China? The answer is a resounding no. Several pieces of evidence demonstrate that this is not a handful of rogue incidents but a systemic and entrenched practice.
As early as March 2024, Yao Jinbo, chairman and CEO of 58.com—a major online business portal—raised concerns during China’s annual legislative meetings. He proposed stricter regulation of cross-regional law enforcement and judicial approval procedures, and suggested that all confiscated funds should be transferred to the central treasury. The rationale was explicit: local police and prosecutors had turned law enforcement into a profit-driven enterprise, and the only way to curb this perverse incentive was to take financial rewards out of their hands. If such a measure was necessary, then clearly, the problem was neither trivial nor rare.
Another revealing document is an internal provincial report from Guangdong, dated April 15, 2024. It bluntly states: “Internet companies in Guangdong are being subjected to profit-driven law enforcement from outside the province, making survival increasingly difficult.”
And if further proof were needed, it is worth noting that this practice has been widespread for years. In April 2020, Yiwu—a major hub for China’s small and medium-sized export businesses—issued a warning to police officers from other provinces. In an official memo, local authorities cautioned outside law enforcement against excessive or selective enforcement and threatened to escalate complaints to higher levels if such abuses continued. This indicates that by 2020, Yiwu was already a prime target of these “deep-sea fishing” operations.
The reality is that this has long been a large-scale problem. But it was only in late 2024—after state media “set the narrative”—that it entered public discourse. In China’s controlled media environment, even official outlets dare not scrutinize the police without a green light from above. When People’s Daily ran its article, it was effectively signaling that discussing “deep-sea fishing” was now permissible.
Let’s examine a few cases in detail, each offering a different angle on how this system operates.
Case One: The Lone Wolf Shakedown
Our first case comes from Zhejiang, one of China’s wealthiest provinces. In June 2023, two out-of-province police officers, fully equipped with uniforms, handcuffs, and body cameras, traveled across Zhejiang and Jiangsu in search of opportunities. On June 11, they entered the home of an entrepreneur, Shen, in Wujiang, Jiangsu, under the pretext of assisting with an investigation. While driving him away, they hinted that his company was in trouble but that they could “help” for the right price.
What they did not anticipate was that Shen, realizing the nature of the situation, leapt from the moving vehicle in Deqing County, Zhejiang, and reported them. Initially, Zhejiang police assumed they were imposters running a scam. Only later did they discover that these two were, in fact, real law enforcement officers.
Some might assume this was a rogue operation carried out without their employer’s knowledge. But the subsequent trial dispels any such illusion. Rather than being charged with extortion, the officers were convicted of abuse of power—a significantly lighter offense that applies only to public officials acting within their official capacity. This confirms that the kidnapping was not an act of personal ambition but an institutional practice. Their sentences? Eight and seven months, respectively—barely the time it took to process their case. By the time of the verdict, they were effectively released from detention, unlikely to spend a single additional day behind bars.
Case Two: The Manufactured Jurisdiction
The second case, reported by Yicai Global, involves a fatal cross-regional arrest. In this instance, police from Inner Mongolia traveled to Beijing to detain an entrepreneur on suspicion of running an online gambling platform. The app in question was a Texas Hold’em poker game that allowed users to purchase in-game tokens—tokens that could not be exchanged for cash. The legal status of such a platform was, at best, ambiguous. More importantly, the company was registered, operated, and headquartered in Beijing. Inner Mongolia had no clear jurisdiction over the matter.
Despite this, the police proceeded with the arrest. In December 2023, the local prosecutor’s office reviewed the case and declined to approve the suspect’s detention, meaning he should have been released immediately. Instead, the police placed him under “designated residential surveillance”—a notorious extrajudicial detention method in China that lacks oversight and is often a prelude to coerced confessions. Four months later, his family received notice that he had “committed suicide” while in custody—a claim they categorically rejected.
This case exemplifies a classic false flag operation in Chinese policing. A provincial law enforcement agency fabricates a flimsy pretext—anything from a consumer complaint to a minor regulatory violation—to assert jurisdiction over an entrepreneur based in a wealthier region. The goal is not law enforcement, but the confiscation of assets.
Case Three: The Crime Transplant
The third case is even more convoluted. It began with a Chinese national (A) who was caught engaging in fraud in Cambodia and extradited to China. Upon his return to Hebei, police interrogators discovered that he had previously worked at an iron mine in another province and had once been involved in a minor workplace altercation.
This led police to detain the mine’s former security chief (B), hoping to extract information about the mine’s owner. Upon learning that the mine’s owner had substantial cash reserves—over 1 billion RMB ($140 million) in liquid assets—police swiftly escalated the matter. They merged the cases of A, B, and the mine owner, branding them as an “organized crime syndicate.” The mine owner and multiple employees were arrested. Authorities seized $140 million in cash, 104 properties, and eight vehicles.
Following the pattern of the previous case, the suspects were not held in standard detention but placed under “designated residential surveillance.” During his 2024 trial, the mine owner testified that he had suffered extreme torture and degrading treatment—details of which were so disturbing that they were left out of official reports. The verdict was delivered on January 11, 2025: nine years in prison and the complete confiscation of his personal assets.
This is a textbook case of criminalization by association. In China, when an entrepreneur’s employees or associates are implicated in any form of violent crime—however minor—prosecutors can escalate the charge to “leading an organized crime group.” This legal maneuver allows authorities to confiscate vast sums of private wealth under the guise of fighting criminal syndicates.
At its core, “deep-sea fishing” is motivated by a single objective: money. It is predatory law enforcement, with police and local governments hunting entrepreneurs to plug financial shortfalls. Confiscated assets are used to cover government salaries, repay debts, and fund local expenditures.
This is why Yao Jinbo’s proposed solution was simple yet revealing: confiscated funds should be transferred to the central treasury. In other words, take away the profit motive, and these cross-regional kidnappings might finally stop.
2. Deep-Sea Fishing: A Relic of the Past or a Mutation of the Future?
Even after all this, I understand if it still sounds utterly surreal—like a grim dystopian novel or some ghastly fable from a bygone age. How does such a thing happen in contemporary China? Is this a remnant of pre-modern barbarism, or a bizarre postmodern phenomenon waiting to be deciphered?
The foundation of this entire practice is the sheer power of the police—particularly their unchallenged authority over financial assets. In China, police at the county level or above can freeze any individual’s bank account with virtually no oversight. The system that enables this was built under the pretext of “protection.” The simplest procedure is for the police to unilaterally decide that an account is at risk of fraud, at which point they can freeze all transactions—without the individual’s approval, without notification. In a modern society, this is equivalent to economic paralysis. Unfreezing the account, of course, requires police approval.
And it does not stop at individual accounts. The police can freeze entire networks of accounts in one sweep. If Account A is flagged, every account that has transacted with it in the past month can also be locked down—effectively putting vast sums of money under police control. To seize these funds permanently, all that is needed is a simple court ruling, such as the one in the iron mine case: “All personal assets are confiscated.” In a country without judicial independence, courts function as extensions of the local political apparatus.
In this brutal game, the only force capable of counterbalancing the police is not the victims, not the media—China has long since dismantled its civil society—but another police force from a rival jurisdiction. And the reason is as pragmatic as it is cynical. Local governments see businesses as part of their revenue base and employment strategy. The reason “deep-sea fishing” is always cross-provincial is that local authorities hesitate to cannibalize their own economic foundations. In the past, state-sanctioned expropriation primarily targeted heavy industries—real estate, mining—because these could be absorbed into state-owned enterprises. The goal was not destruction but control. But this wave of predation is different. It targets businesses with high cash flow—e-commerce platforms, direct sales networks—where the objective is not acquisition but liquidation. The company’s survival is irrelevant; the cash is all that matters.
This explains why provinces like Guangdong and Zhejiang—China’s economic powerhouses—are the most vocal opponents of deep-sea fishing. They are not the perpetrators; they are the victims, losing businesses and tax revenue to predatory raids from poorer provinces.
Of course, the most brutal irony is how local protectionism plays out in practice. Take, for example, a direct sales company in Shenzhen. The industry itself is legally ambiguous, but to Shenzhen’s government, the firm’s ¥2 billion in cash reserves are already mentally accounted for as local assets. If any police department is going to seize that money, it must be Shenzhen’s own. The private entrepreneur, in this scenario, is mere prey—the only question is which predator gets the kill.
3. The Long History of Persecuting Private Entrepreneurs
Yiwu’s 2020 warning memo proves that these practices did not emerge overnight. 2023 was merely the peak of “deep-sea law enforcement,” driven by China’s deepening fiscal crisis.
But the broader war against private entrepreneurs in China is decades old. Since the early years of economic reform, the state has treated private business owners as fair game. The Hurun Rich List, China’s version of the Forbes billionaire ranking, has long been nicknamed the Pig Slaughter List—a dark joke referring to how many listed entrepreneurs eventually find themselves jailed or expropriated.
The first systematic campaign to criminalize private business was launched by Bo Xilai in Chongqing during his failed power struggle with Xi Jinping. Under his “Sing Red, Strike Black” campaign—a grotesque mixture of Maoist nostalgia and authoritarian populism—he began using criminal charges to dismantle private wealth. His methods pioneered what we have described as crime transference—where entrepreneurs were arbitrarily labeled as organized criminals. Victims of this purge included:
- Li Qiang, whose company operated in transport and real estate;
- Li Jun, whose $40 billion fortune was ultimately lost, forcing him into exile;
- Gong Gangmo, tortured into implicating his own defense attorney;
- Wang Tianlun, whose brother was executed while he himself was sentenced to life.
Bo Xilai ultimately lost his power struggle, but his model survived him. In 2018, Xi Jinping resurrected it under a new national campaign: “Sweep Away Black and Evil.” This was China’s equivalent of Duterte’s drug war—using populist rhetoric to justify mass arrests, asset seizures, and extrajudicial punishment.
One of its most infamous victims was Sun Dawu, a businessman with liberal political connections. In 2020, he was charged under the same “organized crime” pretext and sentenced to prison. His business empire, worth at least ¥5.1 billion, was auctioned off for just ¥680 million—a looting operation that generated an instant ¥4.4 billion windfall for the state.
Historically, these crackdowns served two functions: they dismantled political networks that might challenge the regime, and they allowed the state to seize private wealth. But in the post-COVID economy, the calculus has changed. Now, the overriding goal is simple: cash. The financial crisis of local governments has turned deep-sea fishing into a survival strategy. The techniques have been refined to an art—efficient, ruthless, and disturbingly well-practiced.
4. Has Deep-Sea Fishing Ended?
At this point, one thing should be clear: beyond human rights and legal concerns, deep-sea fishing is eviscerating China’s business climate, undermining local economies, and casting a long shadow over an entire generation of entrepreneurs. Left unchecked, it alone could be sufficient to cripple China’s economy.
This, at last, is why the central government has moved to curb it. In October 2024, China’s Supreme Court issued new regulations on asset freezing, requiring formal documentation for both online and cross-regional freezes—essentially blocking the technical loophole that allowed police to seize assets at will. In December, the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office followed suit, imposing restrictions on regional prosecutors handling deep-sea cases.
Meanwhile, Beijing launched a ¥10 trillion debt relief program to alleviate local fiscal pressure—an attempt to remove the underlying economic incentive for these raids. And, most tellingly, People’s Daily itself declared deep-sea fishing a problem. In a system where the media functions as a state-controlled instrument, this was the regime’s way of signaling that the practice had become politically untenable.
So, has it ended?
The answer is an unequivocal no. The iron mine ruling in January 2025 made that clear. The killing spree has not stopped.
Beyond financial motivations, deep-sea fishing is also a mechanism for career advancement within China’s police bureaucracy. In the Texas Hold’em case, for instance, the Inner Mongolia police department listed it as one of six major “gambling syndicates” taken down in their crime statistics. From local police officers to senior officials, everyone stands to profit—financially or politically. Their incentive to continue is far from extinguished.
And in a country without a free press, without civil society, without judicial independence, what private entrepreneur can ever truly be safe?