• Aquaculture in China documents success stories in Chinese aquaculture, and describes both modern trends and future directions to promote a wider discussion around successful aquaculture experience.
• The contents of the book will be the result of a collaborative arrangement between the Worldwide Fund for Nature, The China (Wuhan) Institute of Hydrobiology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and private sector groups involved in servicing the aquaculture sector in China as well as overseas.
• Globally China is the leading aquaculture producer and by far the dominant aquaculture player.
• China has one of the longest continuous histories of aquaculture and it is in the midst of very rapid development changes that offer a variety of new and potentially intriguing insights for the future development of aquaculture.
• Given the rapid development of China and its future population projections, China offers an important window on fish value chain thinking. It is expected that given the enormous and rapidly changing demand for fish products, globally and in China that a more detailed understanding of the past, present and future role of aquaculture in China, will offer important thinking on trends related to future food security in China, in the rest of Asia and the world.
• China is a country undergoing rapid change and therefore offers important future directions on change processes more generally related to aquaculture development and food. Given its large demand for fish and its rapidly expanding economic development, there are a variety of related resource system issues, competing production systems , and the correlated ecosystem stresses, in which China can provide important potential sets of lessons learned and indicators of change that may have learning potential for the rest of the world.
• Chinese aquaculture offers a wide variety of important case material both in terms of species and culture systems (e.g. multitrophic systems thinking such as the traditional integrated fish farming system) with novel production systems in both marine, brackish and freshwater areas, which until now has been little known and or publicised outside China
• China also has a wide climate and ecosystem variation both east-west and north-south (tropical to cold temperate) which offers a wide variety of climate and ecotypes and a variety of new and evolving governance and management systems
• Strong government support and interest in food security linked to aquaculture as part of its changing global role together with a rapidly strengthening science capability
