To preserve the Yangzi’s fish, officials are using a blunt method

FOR TWO thousand years the fishermen of China’s great rivers have served the literati as symbols of hardships patiently endured. One of the country’s best-known poems ponders an old man fishing alone on a boat, protected from the snow by a straw hat. Another describes a fisherman on an island in the Yangzi, indifferent to the vagaries of fate. Political suffering was not forgotten by the poets of old. A fictional fisherman tells a celebrated official, Qu Yuan, who is feeling suicidal because of state corruption, that a sage should adapt to worldly changes. Clear waters can wash an official’s hat tassels, he sings mockingly as he rows away. Muddy waters can still serve for washing feet.

This cherished poetic heritage is not enough to save the fishermen of the Yangzi. There have been years of grim data about stocks being wiped out from the country’s main rivers. A new report by government scientists has declared one of the Yangzi’s rarest species, the giant Chinese paddlefish, functionally extinct. Officials this month unveiled their remarkable solution. By the end of this year all fishing on the Yangzi and its major tributaries will be banned for ten years. This will cast 280,000 registered fishermen out of a job. More than 300 areas were closed on January 1st, shortly after local officials brought in mechanical diggers to smash boats and haul them away.