Conservation campaign gives new life to Yangtze

Wei Qiwei, 64, has vivid childhood memories of water and fish.

- LIU KUN and HOU LIQIANG

"For us kids, the Yangtze River was a place of comfort and fun," he said. "We couldn't live without it."

For Wei, born in De'an, a county near Poyang Lake along the Yangtze in Jiangxi province, the most important thing about the river was that it provided his favorite food, fish, and his grandfather was a fisherman who fished with the help of trained cormorants.

"The bird could easily catch fish because there were quite a lot of fish back then." Wei said.

However, that all changed, said Wei, now chief scientist of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences in Beijing.

He talks of the scarcity of fish that confronted him when he first surveyed the Yangtze between 2017 and 2020.

"Fishers hardly had any catch. The money they made from selling fish was barely enough to cover the cost of the fuel."

A total of 323 fish species were found in the river, with 135 historically distributed in the Yangtze undiscovered, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, which funded the survey.