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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
The answer, in part, was a story the state had been helping to write for years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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