Digital Enclosure: Tanka People and Smart Fishing Port in the Pearl River Delta

Introduction

Located at the mouth of the Pearl River in South China, Lotus Mountain Fishing Port in the Panyu District of Guangzhou City houses many Tanka people. In 2021, this district was designated as the pilot area for the National Fishing Port Economic Zone, and Lotus Mountain Fishing Port is now being transformed into a smart fishing port that incorporates big data technologies.¹“Notice of Panyu District People’s Government of Guangzhou Municipality on the Construction of Panyu National Costal Fishing Port Economic Zone Shangxiachong Harbour Shelter Anchorage Engineering Project,” n.d. http://www.panyu.gov.cn/gzpyslz/gkmlpt/content/9/9426/post_9426317.html#1647. The Tanka people living in this area were relocated to new homes on land arranged by the government, with their old ones demolished. Under the state discourse of building China into a strong maritime country and boosting the blue economy, the integration of big data and smart fishing technologies into the fishing industry has resulted in this area undergoing enormous shifts in land, labor, and technology. 

In 2024, I interviewed several Tanka people at Lotus Mountain Fishing Port in Guangzhou. What struck me was the discrepancy that existed between the official narrative and local experiences. Government documents celebrated the project in this area as a model of digital transformation, rural revitalization, and marine modernization. Yet the Tanka people I spoke with, especially the older generation, told a different story: they are losing access to fishing grounds, community networks, and the intimate relationship with the sea that had shaped their livelihoods for generations. Through these conversations, paired with accounts derived from news articles, journals, and official documents, this essay interrogates the digital enclosure of automated media in fisheries governance and uncovers its extractive dynamic in the context of China, where developmentalism discourse is imposed from above.

Mark Andrejevic’s notion of “digital enclosure” describes a process that combines the spatial characteristics of land enclosure with the metaphorical process of information enclosure that separates users from the means of interaction, transaction, communication, and expression.²Mark Andrejevic, “Ubiquitous Computing And the Digital Enclosure Movement,” Media International Australia 125, no. 1 (2008): 11. By leveraging a Marxist reading of the land enclosure, which produces the conditions necessary for the exploitation of wage labor, he elaborates that digital enclosure extends the spatial characteristics of land enclosure to the social realm in its entirety. In this process, the logic of separation (of people from one another and of people from their data) is achieved via intermediation.³Mark Andrejevic, “Meta-Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” Surveillance & Society 20, no. 4 (2022): 391. This essay follows Mark Andrejevic’s method of inquiry, but shifts focus to the operations and mediations of digital enclosure in the technologies of oceanic space. In examining smart infrastructures like these implemented at Lotus Mountain Fishing Port, I argue that such initiatives reify a form of double enclosure: a physical enclosure of the open sea that deprives fishermen of their means of production, and a digital enclosure produced through infrastructures of networked and sensor-equipped devices, where access is closely monitored and regulated. 

My observations at Lotus Mountain Fishing Port also led me to think about digital enclosure in a specifically Chinese context, where there is a socialist legacy of using agricultural modernization toward nationalist ends. In the context of building a smart fishing port in China, state actors cast data-driven fisheries and digital monitoring of coastal areas as a broadly positive development that enables more economic benefits to small fishermen in the name of rural revitalization. Yet what I observed on the ground revealed a more complicated picture. While the socialist legacy of state-led modernization promises collective prosperity, the benefits and burdens of these transformations are unevenly distributed. For many Tanka families, promises of inclusion coexist with experiences of displacement, restricted access to marine resources, and growing dependence on technological systems they neither own nor control. 

Background: Tanka People and Lotus Mountain Smart Fishing Port

The Tanka people are a traditionally boat-dwelling, sinicized ethnic group native to the Pearl River Delta in southern China, including areas around Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau.⁴With its waterscapes characterized by multiple islands, the Peral River Delta (PRD) is a historically dynamic zone of trade, migration, and colonial encounter. PRD in precolonial times was treated as the area composed of islands and waterways and as a pathway up from the colonial island enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao and into China’s interior during the colonial period; in the Reform and Opening Up era, it turned into a Great Bay Area when the modern Chinese state has implemented a succession of planning-oriented conceptions of the region. Historically, the Tanka were discriminated against by land-dwelling Han Chinese and were excluded from land-based society, which led to their unique, water-based ways of living. They were banned from owning land, attending school, or marrying Han Chinese under various imperial edicts. Often labeled as “non-people” by the state, they were even excluded from formal registration systems. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the government organized the relocation of the Tanka people to move them ashore and improve their living conditions.⁵《山海之間:從華南到東南亞》 (2014, 麻國慶主編，社會科學文獻出版社) Across the Mountains and Seas: from south China to southeast asia (2014, Ma Guoqing ed, Social Sciences Literature Press) The result was a fundamental change in their living habits, as they gradually settled on land. 

My aim is not just to lament the disappeared culture of the Tanka people but to investigate how building a smart fishing port in the Pearl River Delta through universalizing technologies and smart infrastructure repeats the developmentalism ideology and extractivism logic of the relocation project that happened last century. I argue that the ways in which tech companies and the Chinese government see the open sea as a frontier for their ambition to implement marine technologies and organize environmental data are in dialogue with the historical event of the Tanka people being relocated onshore. Historical practices become reworked in contemporary circumstances when the platforming of oceanic space is implemented as a contemporary model for ocean capitalization and control.

Once again, Lotus Mountain Fishing Port in Panyu is located at the mouth of the Pearl River and is home to many fisherfolk communities and Tanka people. With its long history, culture, and natural location, Lotus Mountain Fishing Port has become a new landmark of fishing ports in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.⁶In 2015, “The Greater Bay Area,” as a government-sponsored, top-down regionalising concept, was raised, aiming to bridge 9 cities in Guangdong Province and 2 two special administrative regions (SARs) and deepen Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao cooperation to advance the development of the Greater Bay Area. In 2021, Panyu District in Guangzhou issued the “Panyu National Coastal Fishing Port Economic Zone Construction Plan (2021-2030)”, which aims to improve the construction and management of fishing ports in a systematic way and to build Lotus Mountain Fishing Port into a smart, safe, green, humanistic, and industrial fishing port, with a total investment of 1.41 billion yuan.⁷“番禺‘百千万工程’奋楫扬帆再出发  广州市番禺区人民政府门户网站,” n.d. “Panyu’s Hundred Million Project” sets sail again Guangzhou Panyu District People’s Government Porta,” http://www.panyu.gov.cn/ztzx/fzqyhyshjzc/qyfc/content/post_9543875.html. Being the first national-level fishing port economic zone in the Greater Bay Area, Lotus Mountain Smart Fishing Port is now branded by official state media and state-run agricultural science departments as highly sustainable, innovative, and efficient in terms of promoting the comprehensive revitalization of the port area, strengthening ocean governance, and boosting marine economic development.⁸“番禺国家级沿海渔港经济区招商推介会在莲花山客运港举行  广州市番禺区人民政府门户网站,” n.d. Panyu “National Coastal Fishing Port Economic Zone Business Promotion Conference was held at Lianhuashan Passenger Port,” Guangzhou Panyu District People’s Government Portal, http://www.panyu.gov.cn/zwgk/zfxxgkml/xxgkml/zwdt/fzxw/content/post_10190490.html. 

The official narrative tends to overlook a material history of oceanic capitalism and favors technical optimism in providing a smarter future. Extractivism of the Tanka people and the ocean environments is rendered invisible under the imaginaries around technology and modernity cultivated in the process of promoting the construction of a strong maritime nation. Instead, this narrative talks about how incorporating high-tech in the fishing industry could benefit the lives of traditional fishing communities and bring more job opportunities to the local Tanka people. However, these promises often obscure the material cost of the smart fishing port initiative such as land dispossession, forced relocation, and cultural erasure among Tanka people, as well as environmental degradation. Such consequences are secondary to the modernity and technological progress narrative of China. 

In Panyu, relocating Tanka people onshore and enclosing the open sea result from the mantra of agricultural modernization. Most of the fishermen in Lotus Mountain Fishing Port are Tanka people, who have a unique cultural life and living environment. Four fishing villages near the port—Satellite Village, Qunxing Village, Dongxing Village, and Mingxing Village—have preserved many stilt fishing buildings and traditional living customs. When I first visited this area, mass demolition of Tanka homes was already underway. To build up the Panyu National Coastal Fishing Port Economic Zone, more than 500 houses and sheds were demolished, and these Tanka people are only compensated with limited money and a new home on land, with little care given to their living conditions and cultural traditions.⁹“番禺国家级沿海渔港经济区建设再提速  广州市番禺区人民政府门户网站,” n.d. “The construction of Panyu National Coastal Fishing Port Economic Zone has been accelerated again.” Guangzhou Panyu District People’s Government Portal, http://www.panyu.gov.cn/zwgk/zfxxgkml/xxgkml/zwdt/fzxw/content/post_9312519.html. This also creates conditions in which rural Tanka migrants are trapped in poverty. 

In China, the burgeoning infrastructural capitalism and the enclosure of the open sea for the oceanic modernization are implemented by the government in the name of rural revitalization and developing China into a strong maritime nation. However, beneath the official narrative, incorporating smart technologies further deprives the Tanka of the means of production by rendering them obsolete or subjecting them to the infrastructural capitalism operated by big-tech and the government. From the conversation I had with the Tanka people, their relationship with the sea has dramatically changed. Originally, they could fish freely on the open sea, and now there are administrative restrictions that allow them limited access to open sea fishing. Most older generations of Tanka have to retire and live on the minimal pension with which it is hard to survive.¹⁰My Fieldtrip video, February 19, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OojofTep_gk. For the younger generation of Tanka, some can still fish, but with stricter requirements, such as taking exams to own a license and being allowed a limited time to fish offshore. Most younger generations of Tanka no longer see fishing as a viable future and have turned to other forms of work.¹¹My Fieldtrip video, February 19, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoAwSsAUfi0. 

Digital Infrastructure and Wet Environing Media

The process of separating Tanka from the means of production is achieved both physically and virtually. Apart from the forced migration of the Tanka people, building Lotus Mountain Fishing Port into a smart fishing port entails the mass implementation of data infrastructures and the rapid rise and deployment of digital technologies for managing the ocean and the coastal area. By adopting smart fishing technologies, ownership of and control over the means of interaction and information production, distribution, and storage are transferred to the government and big-tech companies. Under these circumstances, fishermen’s activities, movements, and communications are continuously captured, processed, and governed through infrastructures over which they have little control. Such a condition resonates with what Andrejevic refers to as digital enclosure, where people are separated from one another as well as from their data via intermediation.¹²Andrejevic, “Meta-Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” 391. Even though the digital enclosure also relies on the logic of separation, this is far less obvious than the physical enclosure of land. Tanka people may appear to enjoy frictionless connectivity, real-time information, and enhanced efficiency. Yet these benefits depend on technological systems that they neither own nor control. The very infrastructures that promise greater access and participation simultaneously are deeply intertwined with mechanisms of monitoring, regulation, and extraction.

While the earlier relocation initiative sought to discipline floating populations into territorialized governance, contemporary digital infrastructures extend governance outward again, this time by turning the ocean itself into an administrable data space. Such digital infrastructure relies on data capture via widely distributed autonomous sensor networks, including oceanic sensing devices, such as buoys, hulls of boats, underwater gliders, and Argo floats, as well as satellite observation and robotics for ocean observing and monitoring.¹³Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Electronic Mediations, 2016), 145. The official document specifies that the digital transformation and upgrading of the port area should make full use of new technologies such as 5G, big data, and the Internet of Things, and create a digital fishery headquarters economy.¹⁴“智慧海洋领航者–青岛励图高科,” n.d. “Smart Ocean Navigator–Qingdao Litu Hi-Tech,” https://www.qdlimap.com/zhygjjfa. This omnipotent data capturing generates a new mode of governmentality that is based on “atmospheric” or environmental mediation. As Andrejevic describes, automation enables data collection in the atmospheric register and thus the possibility of treating the environment or, to borrow a term from Foucault, the “milieu,” as a medium of governance.¹⁵Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media (London: Routledge, 2020): 104. 

Scholars such as Gabrys and Andrejevic mention the limitations of Foucauldian governance in addressing the current digital society.¹⁶Gabrys, Program Earth, 2020; Andrejevic, Automated Media, 2020. As they argue, Foucauldian understandings of governance and surveillance are largely grounded in the model of the panopticon, a system of internalized surveillance where individuals regulate their own behavior because they feel perpetually observed, even if they are not sure when they are being watched. This framework provides a useful starting point for understanding the imbalanced power relations between the fishermen and the main controlling power of the technological systems that are implemented on the ocean by the authorities. Different from the Foucauldian panopticon, the smart infrastructure allows real-time monitoring of fishing activities and real-time actions on criminal activities via atmospheric data capturing and the big language model. This stage of post-disciplinary logics of monitoring replaces what Andrejevic describes as “the negotiation of competing causal claims with the direct, asymmetric, and ongoing application of pre-emptive power.”¹⁷Andrejevic, Automated Media, 91. Rather than pure video-based surveillance, the omniscient data capture and monitoring system shifts “from discipline to prediction,” “from internalized forms of prevention to externalized modes of pre-emption,” as well as “from the symbolic role of the camera as a signifier of surveillance (addressed to disciplined subjects) to the operational one of automated data capture that monitors behaviors in order to intervene directly in the environment.”¹⁸Andrejevic, Automated Media, 106. 

Key to this new automated governance of space is the integration of collected data into “digital twins” of the ocean, a way of computational modeling and designing of environments that is deployed to simulate the real environment and which shifts the longstanding understanding of humans controlling nature in the digital terrain. According to Wickberg and Lidström, the development of large-scale modeling of the ocean as a digital twin represents a new development in the human-ocean relationship and ocean governance, which expands the human reach for exploitation, extraction, and pollution into the marine realm through digital means.¹⁹Adam Wickberg and Susanna Lidström, “Digital Twins of the Ocean: Wet Environing Media and Marine Futures,” New Media & Society 27, no. 8 (2025): 4465. They further explain how the operation of environing media as a two-way exchange of information between marine ecosystems and the digital twin system is meant to create a feedback loop between the digital and the physical realms. This means that as the physical ocean is datafied, that is, increasingly subjected to the collection of data points, the digital twin can supposedly model and then implement different what-if scenarios and impacts of human-ocean dynamics, so that decision-makers are presented with a clearly delineated set of choices with preemptively identified consequences. As shown in the all-in-one visualizing system of the Smart Fishing Port, the digital twin technology is adopted to generate real-time monitoring and pre-emptive solutions based on the multi-layered data system made possible by the always-on data-capturing devices. In addition, the promotional video by the smart fishing port vendor, Litugaoke, favors a narrative of digital twin technology that can preemptively stop criminal activities from first beginning.  

Andrejevic mentions how the digital twin technologies demonstrate humans’ inability to enclose the natural environment and ensuing need to redouble it in digital form by transforming the components of the environment into sensors to collect data.²⁰Andrejevic, Automated Media, 33. For Andrejevic, such approaches highlight the disparity between disciplinary surveillance and environmental power. An earthquake cannot participate in ongoing logics of self-definition and self-disclosure, as it remains external to processes of subjectification; the most that can be done is to redouble nature so as to simulate its activities in ways that yield actionable knowledge.²¹ Andrejevic, Automated Media, 88. Smart infrastructure extends the ongoing logic of self-definition and self-enclosure by redoubling nature, as environmental power is normally outside of human control and disciplinary surveillance. The digital twin initiative exemplifies this mindset of controlling and taming nature by making a copy of it. However, the copied environment also demonstrates a crisis of epistemology, as knowledge is produced not from causal-effect explanation but is rendered as a kind of actionable information enabled by distributed sensing devices.  

The proliferation of environmental data infrastructures concretizes real relations of territorial domination in ocean space through datafication. This data-driven development in the fishing industry projects seems promising. It is suggested that the data gathered through digital monitoring, combined with artificial intelligence, allows for the precise analysis of fishing vessel locations and movements, which might achieve more efficient fishery management and decision-making. Others have also suggested that machine learning provides an opportunity for quality control and expansion of ocean data, and, by association, for ocean governance.²²Peter Dauvergne, AI In the Wild (The MIT Press eBooks, 2020), 183. Yet, questions remain around data ownership. In the age of big data, asymmetrical forms of data grabbing dispossess individual humans of their self-generated everyday information. As Andrejevic argues, digital enclosure demonstrates a way of theorizing the forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity.²³Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (December 5, 2007): 297, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420701715365. He elaborates on how digital platforms and technologies increasingly extract value from users’ everyday activities and data, which charts the relationship between a material construction of networked interactive environments and the private expropriation of information.²⁴Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” 297. Clearly, Andrejevic offers a useful framework for thinking about the incorporation of high-tech into smart fishing, wherein the extensive amount of data grabbed via digital fishery equipment becomes raw material to be mined and extracted by certain stakeholders to make a larger profit in the marine data economy.  

The all-in-one system of the smart fishing monitoring platform includes not just surveillance technologies for ocean governance but also a fish trading platform that connects the fishing product with e-commerce. More and more profit-driven models are being developed to replace the supposedly public-serving infrastructure. In this process, the activities of fishermen in digital networks generate data with a possible exchange value greater than the sum of its individual parts, yet they never receive their share of that value. The asymmetry of this data capture process forcibly separates fishermen from the means of production; this is a process that Marx describes as “primitive accumulation” and is a necessary precondition for the institution of wage labor insofar as it creates a working class “freed” up to sell control over its labor power.²⁵Alistair Fraser, “Land Grab/Data Grab: Precision Agriculture and Its New Horizons,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 5 (January 10, 2018): 893–912. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1415887. In the context of smart fishing, the digital enclosure renders fishermen a single node within the significantly larger data ecosystem that serves many interests beyond the fishermen themselves.  Most of the time, the Tanka people who originally lived in this area cannot access the data collected via these environmental sensors, which exemplifies how such data grabbing exacerbates the digital divide by fostering social exclusion and information asymmetries.²⁶Karen Bakker, Gaia’s Web (The MIT Press eBooks, 2024), 20. 

Social Deskilling

Born and living on the water, the Tanka people conduct small-scale fishing based on experience and interaction with the environment. In an interview, a member of the older generation of Tanka people, Mr Ho, told me that when they were fishing several decades ago, there was no large machinery to help them, and they used their eyes to judge the weather. Most of the fish they catch is for their food, not for the industry. These traditional fishing practices of the Tanka people sharply contrast with the smart fishery monitored by big data. The valorization of digital data and the devaluing of existing fishermen’s knowledge often occur in tandem. It is implied that the generational knowledge and traditional signals of fishermen are relatively static, whereas digital data is elevated as nimbler and more precise. 

Marx’s notion of the deskilling of craft work in the capitalist mode of production offers a useful framework for thinking about the labor in the smart fishing industry. Indeed, it is now considered almost obvious that Marx saw capitalist development and use of machinery as tending to and, to some extent, designed to reduce skill requirements.²⁷Paul S. Adler, “Marx, Machines, and Skill,” Technology and culture 31, no. 4 (1990): 780, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1990.a901650. With smart fishing, fishermen’s learning processes and abilities to make decisions are disrupted by the rapid pace of new technologies they do not understand. Because the fishery problems are broken into computable tasks, the fishermen do not need the human fishing knowledge inherited from previous generations; they become extensions of computational logics and exchanges, and perform as sensors and actuators. Being scattered into different segments on the assembly line, they only need to understand the task that they manage instead of the whole knowledge structure. Fishermen no longer need to make decisions as these decisions are made for them, from a distance via the data infrastructure. This is the phenomenon of deskilling from a Marxist perspective.  

Modern states and corporations develop big data techniques and infrastructure to replace the local and traditional knowledge of fishing. Digital development reports also highlight population growth, market volatility, and unpredictable marine epidemics as causes of instability that progressively render traditional fishing knowledge obsolete.²⁸Madeleine Fairbairn and Zenia Kish, “‘A Poverty of Data’? Exporting the Digital Revolution to Farmers in the Global South,” in The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics, eds. Jenny Goldstein and Eric Nost (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 217. From the perspective of the high-tech and the government, the automation system implemented in the smart fishing port surpasses the limitations of human judgment and information processing. However, it is also important to consider some of the trade-offs in such a system, or, to borrow from Andrejevic, the biases of automation, which is exemplified by “the displacement of comprehension by correlation, of explanation by prediction and pre-emption, the triumph of efficiency over other social values, and the imperative of total information collection.”²⁹Andrejevic, Automated Media, 30. For example, while the “small data” of fishermen is framed as too slow, fragmented, and imprecise to allow them to keep up with a rapidly changing world, the mass harvesting of fish has already caused irreversible damage to the ocean; now, there are fewer and fewer fish in that area.³⁰My Fieldtrip video, February 19, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OojofTep_gk. 

The digital data is nonetheless framed as a means to uplift small fishermen, producing not just fishery efficiency but also fishermen’s empowerment. Normally, fishermen are defined through a rhetoric of deficits: of technology, of knowledge, of modernity, of adaptability to a changing world.³¹Fairbairn and Kish, “‘A Poverty of Data’?”, 217 The sociotechnical imaginary underpinning data-driven fishery envisions a pervasive digital integration in which fishermen of all scales will be increasingly digitized, their data will be more visible (and profitable) to agribusinesses and other value-chain actors, and fishermen will participate more fully in financial and other privately supplied services; yet the social structure that traps them in conditions of poverty remains unchallenged.³²Xiaowei R. Wang, “Spicy Red in Shrimp Town: Smart Farming and Settler Colonialism in Guizhou Province,” New Media & Society 25, no. 8 (July 13, 2023): 1897. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231174524. Enhanced collection and dissemination of fishing data is posed as a solution, sidestepping any critical accounting of how the structural residues of neoliberal development policies have played a role in producing fishermen’s vulnerability in the first place. The fluidity and lack of fixity of the delta waterscape have lent themselves to political, governmental, and techno-topian enclosure within the significantly larger data ecosystem that serves many interests beyond the fishermen themselves. 

Conclusion

Smart fishing projects a technological modernity that monitors and connects us all, human and nonhuman, through a patchwork of databases and capturing technology. It is through the guise of datafication that universalizing processes are implemented—processes that disregard local, traditional fishing knowledge and small-scale fishing in favor of industrial fisheries and generic standards of productivity, outputs, and market requirements. The data grabbed in these processes serves as the raw material for the digital infrastructure to further boost the marine economy for the benefit of certain stakeholders. 

In the special context of China, the smart infrastructure is coupled with the developmentalism discourse imposed from above, with a state discourse of rural revitalization and building a strong maritime nation. Subsequently, the local and the contextualized ways of production inevitably get lost, which has profound political implications that often serve dominating technocratic interests and state ideology while disregarding the reality of local communities. Digital twins introduce an operative computational layer that promises to make the mess manageable, even profitable, but in doing so, flattens out the rich textures of life in the name of optimized logistical management. In the pursuit of the marine economy in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the smart fishing port initiative demonstrates the double layers of digital enclosure that firstly deprive the rural Tanka villages of their original means of production on the open sea and secondly of their data sovereignty through universalizing technologies. The national narrative is complicit in this process by altering the local ecological conditions and justifying the condition of exploitation brought by the smart infrastructure. Behind the official narrative of the smart fishing port, we should ask who controls, coordinates, and capitalizes on the media infrastructure of data and computation that anticipates the unrealized returns from future probabilities. 

Wendy Wenxin Zhang

Wendy Wenxin Zhang is a PhD student from film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include environmental media studies and media infrastructure in the Asian context. She is now a student fellow for the Environmental Humanities Research Center at UC Irvine and is mainly in charge of organizing screening events, reading groups and conferences.