This may be a dopey question, but my understanding was that gun ownership basically didn't exist in China. The one instance of going shooting in China of which I've heard involved going to a special range in a major city in which rifles were chained to the table at the firing line. How do boats get away with this?
Sometimes countries have a problem with something used domestically, but zero issue when the same is done exclusively for export.
> China permits the sale of hemp seeds and hemp oil and the use of CBD in cosmetics, but it has not yet approved cannabidiol for use in food and medicines. So, for now, the bulk of Hempsoul’s product — roughly two tons a year — is bound for markets overseas.
Chinese fishing boats that are illegally harvesting in other countries' maritime regions spend a great deal of time outside Chinese territory, where Chinese law is not enforced.
And that's ignoring the possibility of collaborating with the Chinese state.
Not that this is happening, but I don't see any large barriers to it.
If they're fishing in the Gulf of California, they might be able to get guns from some Mexican cartel, but they'd better not try to get them back to China.
Though I'm not sure whether that's really happening, since a search for "chinese fishing boats fired" https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+fishing+boats+fired exclusively returns results where coast guards of other nations fired at Chinese boats. If Chinese boats had guns, you'd think they'd use them and we'd get to hear about it.
