TFA discusses all the subsidies and other forms of help from Chinese government, then toward the end it says
Still, China is hardly the worst offender when it comes to such subsidies, which ocean conservationists say, through over-capacity and illegal fishing, are a major reason that the oceans are rapidly running out of fish. The countries that provide the largest subsidies to their high-seas fishing fleets are Japan (20 per cent of the global subsidies) and Spain (14 per cent), followed by China, South Korea, and the United States, according to Sala's research.
First, kinda weird the percentage stats just stopped at Spain, making it impossible to put things into perspective.
Secondly, if Chinese fleets with all the alarming-sounding numbers only place at the third, what are the Japanese and Spaniards doing here? What about their fleet sizes? (Btw, IMHO the number of vessels may be a poor measurement of fleet size, compared to, say, total displacement; we all know how 17,000 little dinghies would compare to 300 aircraft carriers, to give an extreme example.) Do they have even larger fleets? Or do they pay more subsidies per head (or per vessel? or ton of product?) for whatever reason? Unfortunately TFA doesn’t discuss any of that.