At the mouth of China's longest river, the historic gateway to the country's interior and its most important conduit for trade, the world-renowned Yangtze River, self-proclaimed "Somali pirates" have been violently intercepting boats and extorting ransoms.
On March 8, 2013, the good ship Zhesheng 97526 was making a course for for Qidong's Lusi Port on the shores of Jiangsu Province. As she drew 30 nautical miles east of the river estuary, a high-speed boat was sighted on the starboard side advancing aggressively toward the ship. When the smaller vessel drew parallel, the two men aboard used bamboo poles fixed with hooks to board the Zhesheng.
The two men drew vegetable cleavers and hatchets and stormed the bridge. "Cut your your engines and drop anchor!" they howled at the skipper, "your ship cut our fishing nets! Start the engine again and I'll cut you down where you stand!"
As his hatchet-wielding companion made for the bow to drop anchor, another speed boat drew up to the Zhesheng and seven more men appeared on deck. A dark-skinned and heavyset young man came to the fore.
"We are Somali pirates," he announced. "We have commandeered your ship. It's no use sending a distress signal!"
"Your vessel sailed through our fishing grounds and destroyed our nets," he explained to the crew of the Zhesheng, "we demand you pay RMB100,000 in damages."
The Zhesheng's captain, known as Old Kong, parleyed with the shipping company's boss on the telephone, and all parties settled on a sum of RMB20,000. The pirates then quickly disbanded once they got word that the money had been transferred to their account.
As the sun sank beneath the horizon, the crew of the Zhesheng breathed a sigh of relief and decided to drop anchor for the night and continue their journey at dawn.
The ship had only been sailing for 20 minutes the next morning, however, when speedboats harried her yet again. Captain Kong dropped anchor once more and prepared for the worst as the men grappled their way on deck.
"We are Somali pirates," they proclaimed. "You damaged our fishing nets and we demand compensation!"
In a now all-too-familiar scene, the attackers stormed the bridge armed with iron bars. This time around, Captain Kong was growing impatient. "We did not sail through your nets!" he insisted. "Another group extorted RMB20,000 from us just yesterday. We're running out of money, couldn't you ask for less?"
"They were one of us," the pirate leader expounded reflectively. "Give us RMB20,000 then! You're not going anywhere until we get the money!"
In the end, Capt. Kong and the pirates met at RMB10,000 and then parted ways.
The Golden Age of Piracy in the Yangtze Delta
According to subsequent police investigations, the Zhesheng was far from the only victim of this buccaneering extortion racket.
The leader of the first party to descend on the Zhesheng was one Ma Daxi, and the second pirate chieftan was Zhang Liusheng, both natives of Guanyun County in coastal Lianyungang, Jiangsu.
Needless to say, neither of the men were Somali - and nor were they really pirates. Both made a living from illegally harvesting eels in the estuary, all until one day when Ma and his friends were chatting at the port of Lianxing. They admitted to each other that business was bad and they were just plain depressed.
Ma told his buddies about a case he heard about where a ship snagged some nets nearby and had to pay the fishers a pretty penny in compensation. This got them thinking: what if we make some of the ships that ply up and down these shores every day give us money, using broken fishing nets as a pretext, and then split the booty evenly amongst us?
On February 9, 2013, they struck for the first time. Spying a ten-ton freighter pass through fishing waters, they forced their way on deck with knives and steel pipes and commanded the crew to stand and deliver. When they boarded their speed boats once again and disappeared into the distance, they did so RMB30,000 richer.
As news of Ma's exploits reached his home village, local layabout Zhang Liusheng assembled his own crew and pushed out to sea, the two slackers-turned-swashbucklers joining hands to terrorize the shallows of the Yangtze Delta together.
Jiangsu's Golden Age of Piracy did not last long for Ma and Zhang, however. Apprehended soon after the attack on the Zhesheng, the two men, along with seven of their lackeys, were sentenced to five years' imprisonment this week at the Chongchuan District Court in Nantong.
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