[yorwba]

> Presumably all Chinese

That seems unlikely considering that Vietnam's entire coastline forms the western border of the South China Sea, so that's where they're most likely to fish. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia also border the sea and occasionally stop fishing boats in what they consider their territorial waters.

China probably has the largest fleet, but that doesn't mean the other countries are just watching them fish without doing anything.

[jvanderbot]

OP/TFA implied that it was indeed Chinese, by encroaching on territorial waters and crowding out native fleets. At least that was my reading of the article and the above comment.

[yorwba]

Yes, and I was arguing against that idea. The other countries didn't suddenly stop fishing in the area. And FWIW all of them are about equally "native" to the region, as in, people from all the surrounding coasts have been fishing there for centuries. Just the scale is new.