Although more than half a century has passed, Kim Sang-jin still remembers when his family placed doenjang, a soybean paste, outside their home on South Korea’s Heuksan Island to ferment overnight – only to find it gone the next morning.
“That’s how we knew,” Kim said, “North Korean spies had infiltrated the island.”
In the late 1960s, the communist country used Heuksan as a base for espionage operations. South Korean soldiers killed three North Korean infiltrators in 1969, and scenes of gunfire and grenade flashes are etched on Kim’s memory, as is the fear that pervaded the small community about 90 kilometers (60 miles) west of South Korea’s southern coast.
Kim, 80, still lives on Heuksan. His worry now, though, is less about North Korean spies and more about Chinese fishing vessels trolling nearby fisheries. These days, it isn’t doenjang that goes missing but the tools of the commercial fishing trade.
“The Chinese boats drag and remove our nets, causing substantial losses from our end,” Kim said.
When it comes to China’s maritime ambitions, much of the world’s attention has focused on its expansive claims to the South China Sea and the so-called nine-dash line, which critics like the U.S. say contravenes international law. Chinese coast guard ships have blocked fishing boats from Vietnam and the Philippines from areas that those governments say are theirs.
Occasional violent clashes in the Yellow Sea have flared up too, but for the most part China and South Korea have settled on an uneasy truce kept together by limited agreements.
But an eastward push by Chinese commercial fishing boats and naval vessels threatens to change the dynamics on the Yellow Sea, and is fueling a growing sense of unease on Heuksan and islands farther north.
An airport South Korea plans to start building soon on Heuksan is raising some islanders’ hopes that their government is planning a more robust response.
Its main purpose is to make travel to and from the mainland easier. A trip to Seoul now takes around seven hours by ferry and train; a flight will shorten it to just one. But residents like Kim are also looking to the airport, which will open in 2027, to help the government respond to Chinese fishing boats trying to steal sockeye salmon, mackerel and the other marine bounties from the Yellow Sea.
Although its runway will be too small to accommodate most military aircraft, the airport can support short-takeoff and landing capable C-130s and CN-235s operated by the coast guard. An approval document noted its benefit to maritime patrols.
The airport “has potential to enhance maritime and aerial activities, bolstering military security operations,” former South Korea air force Maj. Park Kyung-ae, who was also a lecturer at the Joint Forces Military University during her service, told RFA.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which both South Korea and China are signatories, grants countries exclusive economic zones up to 200 nautical miles out to sea. But South Korea’s and China’s zones overlap, leaving a measure of ambiguity as to where one country’s territorial rights end and the other’s begin.
Since 2001, Seoul and Beijing have operated under a “provisional measure zone” that delineates where fishing boats from each side are allowed to operate. But South Korea says that China has been lax in enforcing the pact, and its fishing vessels frequently venture far to the east, sometimes entering South Korean waters.
In 2014, South Korea estimated that illegal Chinese fishing had cost the country $1.2 billion. Since then, incursions have continued, as Chinese fishers search out seafood beyond the depleted waters surrounding their country.
South Korea’s coast guard evicted a total of 2,796 Chinese ships in 2017. That number rose to 20,997 in 2020 before tapering off to 1,504 last year, according to data obtained by RFA through South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik.
China has agreed starting in May 2024 to require fishing vessels from the country to activate automatic identification systems while operating in South Korea’s economic zone. The move, aimed at curbing illegal fishing, was announced by Seoul’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries on Nov. 3.
But a sense of unease lingers among Heuksan residents, whose livelihoods are closely linked to the sea and the “golden fishing grounds” around them. They aren’t convinced the threat of illegal fishing will be completely removed.