When Chinese state television hailed inland salmon as a miracle in 2018, many viewers saw something more familiar: not a wonder, but a sales pitch.
The segment, aired by China Central Television that May, celebrated salmon farming in western China. Over images of sleek fish cutting through clear water, the narrator marveled that “a precious fish like salmon, which typically lives in the open ocean,” could now be raised inland, in the country’s barren western hinterland. The message was unmistakable. Technology had made the improbable possible. “The land is the same land, and the people are the same people,” the program declared, “but when technology is brought in, miracles are born.”
Online, viewers began poking at the claim almost immediately.
Was that salmon at all, many asked, or just rainbow trout dressed up as something fancier? On Chinese social media, the mood turned from curiosity to irritation. “People expect Atlantic salmon, but we’re getting freshwater rainbow trout that costs half as much,” one Beijing-based WeChat account complained. “How could you not be angry?” Science writer Fang Shimin dispensed with niceties: “This is cheap rainbow trout being passed off as expensive salmon. If you don’t want to deceive consumers, just call it rainbow trout.”
Such anxieties would only grow larger as China worked to sell an idea that, not long ago, might have sounded implausible: seafood from the desert. As China has rapidly expanded its fish farms as part of a state policy aimed at self-sufficiency, it has developed at least 1,000 fish farms in Xinjiang, a historically restive region located in the country’s mountainous and desert inland. The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C. that I founded and run, mapped these farms as part of a sweeping investigation showing how much seafood is reaching the U.S., including government facilities, in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).
The distrust was not irrational. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said this year that while there is no official global estimate for seafood fraud, empirical studies suggest it may exist in up to 20% of the worldwide trade, sometimes appearing as species substitution and other kinds of misrepresentation.
For most people, seafood comes with an expected geography. Salmon belongs to Norway or Alaska. Cod evokes the cold North Atlantic. Shrimp suggests warm coasts and estuaries. Xinjiang, by contrast, calls up deserts, surveillance, cotton fields, and the Chinese government’s mass detention, forced-labor, and assimilation campaign against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, along with the long, hard distances of the country’s far west. The most landlocked patch on the planet, Xinjiang is among the last places many people would associate with premium fish.
And yet for years, Chinese officials, state media, and seafood companies have been trying to teach consumers to do exactly that. They have promoted “Xinjiang seafood” as one of the small wonders of a new China: fish raised in glacial meltwater, in cold mountain reservoirs, in alkaline lakes, and at farms built against the edge of the desert. The imagery is always some variation on the same promise. Geography is no longer destiny. Harsh landscapes can be made productive. A remote frontier, disciplined by engineering, can become a source of delicacy and pride.
In that sense, Xinjiang seafood is not merely an agricultural product. It is a narrative achievement. The state-led campaign to create that narrative matters because it offers a rare window into Beijing’s worries about food security and its methods for redirecting Western attention away from its human rights problems. It also showcases China’s larger ambitions of using industry to help settle a historically restive region. This campaign saw its zenith in 2023, when Xinhua News Agency reported that the “Xinjiang seafood” label had surged in prominence on Chinese social media. Government data from that year show Xinjiang as China’s second-largest producer of “salmon,” trailing only Qinghai Province on the Tibetan Plateau. Its success is also relevant to what Americans eat, as the Outlaw Ocean Project found that seafood from Xinjiang ends up in the U.S. in violation of federal law. One company, called Tianyun, now ships to 14 countries, including the U.S., and distributes to food companies that supply military bases, public schools, and U.S. congressional cafeterias, according to Bait to Plate, an online tool that tracks the fishing and seafood industries.
Xinjiang Tianyun said in a statement that claims of systemic forced labor “are completely factually unfounded” and described the UFLPA as an unreasonable and politically motivated framework that violates the principles of fair international trade. Xinjiang Tianyun insists that it strictly abides by China’s laws on labor and contracts and resolutely protects the legitimate rights and interests of every employee.
The 2018 salmon dispute exposed how fragile China's narrative of achievement in Xinjiang can be. To some consumers, the issue was simple: they feared they were paying salmon prices for a cheaper fish. But the outrage ran deeper because it also touched food safety. That same year, the Chinese food-safety expert Zhong Kai warned against serving trout raw, citing parasite risks common in freshwater fish. “I do not recommend eating it raw,” he said, advising thorough cooking. Online commenters accused state media of misleading the public. This was “not the salmon ordinary people think of,” they wrote. Masami Takeuchi, a food-safety officer at the FAO, noted that illnesses caused by eating raw freshwater fish can be serious, even when symptoms arrive late or are hard to trace.
The fear, then, was not simply that consumers were being overcharged. It was that they were being sold an aspirational image that obscured material differences in the fish itself.
That anxiety found ready soil in a country where food scandals have repeatedly taught the public to distrust official reassurance. China’s aquaculture industry has expanded at staggering speed, and with that expansion have come the familiar pressures of industrial animal farming: crowding, disease, waste, chemical intervention, and a recurring mismatch between the pastoral language used to market food and the industrial realities that produce it. A 2020 study in Nature found that aquaculture has the highest antibiotic-use intensity per kilogram of biomass among major animal-production sectors, exceeding use in both humans and land-based livestock.
Chinese researchers have warned for years about severe antibiotic abuse in the industry. Sedatives have posed another problem. Diazepam, sometimes used to calm fish during transport, has repeatedly shown up in official inspections despite being prohibited. In 2021, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs began requiring routine diazepam testing, and a 2023 paper in China Food Hygiene Journal described diazepam residues as “widely detected” in water and seafood products. In 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an alert after detecting residues of prohibited substances—including malachite green, a carcinogenic veterinary drug—in seafood shipments from China, citing “significant public-health concerns.”
None of this proves that Xinjiang seafood as a whole is fraudulent or unsafe. But it helps explain why the category has struggled to inspire a durable sense of consumer trust. In a food system often shadowed by contamination scares and labeling disputes, grand claims end up feeling less like reassurance than marketing. The more insistently officials and companies promoted inland salmon, trout, whitefish, caviar, and other products from China’s far west as a new high-value frontier, the more some consumers wondered what, exactly, they were being asked to believe.
The answer, in part, was a story the state had been helping to write for years.
As early as 2011, Vice Minister of Agriculture Niu Dun was urging officials to “enhance brand building and awareness of the market expansion of Xinjiang’s seafood enterprises.” A 2017 government Action Plan for Fisheries Poverty Alleviation and Aid to Xinjiang and Tibet and Xinjiang went further, instructing local offices to “strengthen communication and coordination with mainstream media” and to “systematically publicize the progress of fishery poverty alleviation,” thereby creating what it called “an environment of positive public opinion.” The phrasing was telling. Fisheries in Xinjiang were to be built, yes. But they were also to be narrated.
That narration took many forms. Officials promoted fish-themed tourism. In Wenquan County, a local attraction described as “Xinjiang’s first cold-water fish theme park” invited visitors to tour a museum, sample whitefish sashimi and caviar, and even catch fish on site, weigh them, and bring them into town for processing. The scene was faintly surreal: a region associated abroad with coercion and repression recast domestically as a place of family outings, provincial pride, and specialty delicacies. The politics were never absent. They were simply plated more attractively.
Then, in late summer 2023, the campaign accelerated.
Posts about Xinjiang seafood surged across Chinese social-media platforms. Hashtags such as “Xinjiang welcomes everyone to come eat seafood” and “No joke—Xinjiang really does produce seafood” climbed Weibo’s Hot Search List. On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, interactions tied to Xinjiang seafood jumped spectacularly. A seafood industry report later said that videos associated with “Xinjiang seafood” and “Xinjiang salmon” amassed more than 150 million views in 2023. One widely circulated Douyin clip, “Xinjiang Salmon ‘Leaps’ onto the World Table,” drew more than 2.7 million views and helped touch off the frenzy. Like many of the videos that followed, it lingered on crystalline mountain water, gleaming facilities, and the visual incongruity of prized fish emerging from the country’s interior.
Soon, the theme leapt beyond China’s own internet. YouTube, which is banned in China, saw a sharp rise in Xinjiang seafood videos that fall. The message was no longer meant only for domestic audiences. Xinjiang seafood was being staged for foreign consumption, too—not just as food, but as an emblem of innovation, abundance, and purity.
The timing was hard to miss. On August 24, 2023, Japan began releasing into the Pacific Ocean treated wastewater that had accumulated since the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Beijing denounced the move as “selfish and irresponsible” and imposed a blanket ban on Japanese aquatic products. In the tense weeks that followed, content promoting Xinjiang seafood leaned heavily on purity: glacial melt from the Tian Shan, cold inland reservoirs, waters safely removed from allegedly contaminated seas. Xinjiang seafood was being sold not only as novel or upscale, but as patriotic, safe, and strategically desirable.
To some analysts, the speed and scale of the online surge suggested something more coordinated than ordinary virality. Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the pattern bore the hallmarks of top-down and algorithmic amplification rather than grassroots enthusiasm alone. In his view, the campaign may also have served another purpose: redirecting attention from mounting scrutiny of China’s seafood sector after an October 2023 investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project reported that seafood plants in Shandong had used thousands of Uyghur labor transfers to process fish destined for major Western markets. Against that backdrop, Ryan argued, the flood of upbeat Xinjiang seafood content functioned as a kind of information flooding, crowding search and recommendation systems with stories of “fishery miracles” rather than forced labor.
Whether every post was centrally directed matters less than the political usefulness of the category itself. Xinjiang seafood offered the state an unusually supple symbol. It could suggest scientific prowess, dietary upgrading, regional development, ecological management, and ethnic harmony all at once. It could showcase “clean” water, advanced facilities, and smiling workers. Most of all, it could recast one of the world’s most scrutinized frontiers as a landscape of abundance.
That ambition extends beyond domestic image-making. Beijing plainly hopes to export not just Xinjiang seafood but the idea of Xinjiang seafood. Yet that effort faces an obvious obstacle: In the United States, the UFLPA presumes that goods made wholly or partly in Xinjiang are produced with forced labor unless importers can prove otherwise, while in Europe, a 2024 forced-labor regulation will bar products made with forced labor from the E.U. market once it begins applying in December 2027.
This is where the events depart from a conventional tale of food fraud. In many countries, misleading labels thrive because supply chains are opaque and enforcement is weak. In Xinjiang, opacity was part of the business model. The product itself was being woven into a larger political narrative about what the region was and what it was becoming. Fish farms were not merely farms. They were exhibits.
Part of the effort to promote Xinjiang seafood involved government-orchestrated media tours for foreign journalists and vloggers, often called “frontier influencers” or “global stringers,” to visit Xinjiang, including its fish farms. After being shepherded to government-run facilities and through regions like Tibet or Xinjiang that are typically off limits to most other journalists, these influencers tend to create seeing-is-believing style videos that offer “happy life” testimonials from locals, while showcasing the region as a high-tech and indispensable hub for global development and “green” innovation.
By 2025, Xinjiang seafood had become a recurring stop on that circuit. A state-funded outlet released a video featuring an American vlogger identified as Jack exploring what it called the “agricultural miracle” of a fish farm on the edge of China’s largest desert, the Taklamakan. That same month, a British creator toured a reservoir in Alar City and praised its role in both flood control and local fish production. A Russian student, one of the better-known foreign influencers working this terrain, filmed herself at a salmon farm in Nilka, announcing cheerfully that she had come to be “an employee for a day” and see the industry for herself. Some of the footage circulating during this push featured Tianyun, one of the companies caught up in the earlier inland salmon labeling dispute.
Even some of the industry figures tied to those disputes were later recast as patriotic exemplars of frontier development. In 2025, one prominent executive from Xinjiang’s salmon business was honored in Beijing by the Communist Party as a “National Model Worker,” then pledged to help expand China’s salmon industry and improve the skills of workers from all ethnic groups. The symbolism was familiar by then. Commercial actors were being folded into a larger state story about modernization, unity, and progress in the far west.
All of which points to the larger feat behind Xinjiang seafood’s rise. China did not simply have to learn how to raise cold-water fish in unlikely places. It had to construct a category and teach consumers how to feel about it. It had to make fish from a landlocked, desert-heavy, politically burdened region seem not only possible but desirable: clean rather than contaminated, premium rather than ersatz, modern rather than improvised, harmonious rather than coercive. That required hatcheries, reservoirs, feed, transport networks, and technical expertise. But it also required softer definitions, confident reassurances, staged tourism, influencer testimony, and a steady current of triumphal images.
In the end, Xinjiang seafood is best understood not simply as a product of ponds, pipes, hatcheries, and feed, but as a product of narrative force. Fish flash through cold inland water; cameras glide across reservoirs; influencers smile into the desert light; officials speak of innovation and harmony. The image holds. Until, somewhere behind it, the old questions return: What is this fish, really? Where did it come from? What story is being wrapped around it? In Xinjiang, those questions do not fade when the meal arrives. They sit there at the table.
(The reporting for this story was part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project. Ian Urbina is the founder and executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project.)
