When photographers look for images to capture the effects of China’s nearly three-decade-long economic boom, most often they point their lenses toward the sky. Soaring cities of glass and steel may be the perfect visual shorthand for China’s ambitions, but China’s changing fortunes are just as visible closer to the ground, on the nation’s tables and plates.

In the early 1980s, as the country was just emerging from the privation of its years under Mao, an average Chinese person consumed less than 10 grams of animal protein a day—or roughly a single ounce of meat or fish. Over the past three decades, as the country has grown wealthier and more urban, that number has grown more than tenfold, according to research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ China Power Project.

The country’s appetites, combined with chronic shortages of land and water, as well as severe pollution, mean China has had to turn outward to keep its butchers and fishmongers supplied. The teeming waters off the coast of West Africa have been a key target in a government-subsidized and rapidly expanding foray into the industry known as “distant water fishing.” Chinese companies now captain a flotilla of nearly 3,000 industrial fishing vessels in international waters, the majority in the oceans off of Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea Bissau. While, for the moment, these boats keep Chinese diners well supplied, the industry is poorly regulated and both environmental experts and local and Chinese fishermen say it has severely depleted the region’s once rich fisheries, pushing them, as Andrew Jacobs wrote recently for The New York Times, to the brink.

Frequent ChinaFile contributor Yuyang Liu traveled to Senegal and Guinea Bissau with Greenpeace to photograph crews on the vessels plying their waters, and the way they are changing life back on land.

—The Editors