A Boeing 737 passenger jet departs from Taiwan’s Tao­yuan International Airport, headed for Hainan. After crossing the Hai­nan Straits, it heads for Mei­lan International Airport, just outside of the northeastern city of Hai­kou. The scenery outside the windows is something Taiwanese travelers could not be more familiar with—lush green fields reminiscent of Taiwan’s own Jia­nan Plain, while fisheries dot the landscape like the coastal fisheries of the southwestern Taiwanese coast.

“Taiwan and Hai­nan are as like as peas in a pod,” as many early Taiwanese business visitors to Hai­nan were known to say, in a demonstration of the attachment many feel to the island.

As the aircraft taxis in, a Taiwanese businessman who has made this journey often reaches out, pointing out the nearby Gui­lin­yang Economic Development Zone to the “newbies” coming to Hai­nan for the first time.

On the outskirts of Haikou, Guilinyang is the heart of mainland China’s ornamental blood parrot fish farming industry, in which Taiwanese businesses continue to play a major role. This photo shows a worker feeding fish on the farm of Taiwanese businessman Wu Shunxing.

Gui­lin­yang is 20-plus kilometers to the east of Hai­kou City. A sprawling area covering over 4,200 hectares, it may look like a wasteland of grass and mud, but in reality it is the site of the largest ornamental fisheries area in mainland China, built up over recent years by Taiwanese businesses.

This May, the Hai­nan Ornamental Fish Industry Association was founded in Gui­lin­yang, becoming the first such Chinese industrial organization to be primarily made up of Taiwanese business­people. Association chair Lin Bi­shan remarks that there are some 30 Taiwanese businesses involved in ornamental pisci­culture in Hai­nan, and that they have been the driving force behind the industry on the island, with most of the locals that work in the industry doing contract work for Taiwanese businesses.

In fact, whether it’s growing fruit trees or breeding fish, Taiwanese businesspeople play a leading role in Hai­nan­ese farming, bringing Taiwanese varieties to Hai­nan, and then using that island as a springboard for entry into the mainland Chinese market and its 1.3 billion potential customers.

And thanks to the hard work of these Taiwanese investors in Guilinyang, Hainan is no longer just China’s “wintertime vegetable garden,” but also central to China’s ornamental fish industry.

As well as farming ornamental fish, Wu Shunxing has a small side project growing and trading in potted coffee trees.

Wu Shun­xing, deputy chair of the Hai­nan Ornamental Fish Industry Association, is well known in the industry on the island. Almost 60, Wu was one of the first to bring the hybrid fish breed known as the “blood parrot cichlid” to Hai­nan from Taiwan. In 1999, after closing his fishery in Tai­chung’s Qing­quan­gang, Wu headed off with some NT$3–5 million and began looking to start over, seeing great potential in the Hai­nan Special Economic Zone, with its broad swathes of undeveloped land.

The reason he chose Hai­kou, says Wu, was because Gui­lin­yang has an abundance of groundwater, and because its proximity to the airport would cut down on both the cost of shipping and the risk of fish dying in transit.

The low cost of labor in Hai­nan was another major aspect that attracted Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the early days. “Around a decade ago, a Taiwanese fish farm would have to pay its staff some NT$30–40,000 a month, so for the price of hiring one person in Taiwan, you could hire 10 here,” says Wu, who initially planned to make Hai­nan a temporary stopover, rather than staying there for the long term.

Once his first fish farm opened in Gui­lin­yang, the self-confessed “gambler” Wu decided to double down, using the money he was making from selling his fish to buy more land and build more ponds. The money went out as fast as it came in, which made for some tight situations finan­ci­ally—at the lowest point, after going through all his pockets and drawers, Wu had just RMB13 on hand.

Today, Wu’s home in Hai­kou has three BMW SUVs parked out front. But for all the flash of today, few realize that as recently as 2007, he was still just a minor-leaguer patrolling his ponds on a motorbike.

As the Chinese economy began to boom in the wake of economic reforms, a new class of idle nouveau riche began to rise with it, suddenly making ornamental fish a hot commodity. This in turn saw Wu, who had previously been a major supplier of blood parrot fry, become an overnight success, drawing in a cluster of new aspiring Taiwanese pisciculturalists.

In 2007, Wu smelled an opportunity for growth in the mainland domestic market, and snatched up more land near Mei­lan International Airport. Together, these new acquisitions and his Gui­lin­yang farms total some 40 hectares.

“Back when I was farming in Tai­chung, I was working with an area barely 1% this size,” says Wu, highlighting the difference in scale of the ornamental fish industry on each side of the Taiwan Strait.

As land in Guilinyang continues to be expropriated, Taiwanese businesspeople are left looking for alternatives, with some moving to the city of Sanya and raising fish in the agricultural reservoir.

According to Wu, the production of some 90% of China’s blood parrot cichlid fry and 50% of the adult fish is based in Hai­nan. Every year, a total of over NT$10 billion in fish from Hai­nan are sold to mainland Chinese buyers. Wu’s fish farms produce an average of 10 million blood parrot cichlids a year, with each fish selling for between RMB50 and RMB100, a total value of more than RMB500 million.

However, while the monetary prospects for ornamental fish farming in Hai­nan look good, things are changing. The local government there began focusing on developing the island as an international tourism destination in 2010, and to that end has been looking to take back control of land leased to Taiwanese investors, particularly in Gui­lin­yang, on Hai­kou’s outskirts. Wu explains that just a few years ago, Gui­lin­yang’s fish farms covered some 330 hectares, but today, after all of the lease cancellations, that figure is down to just below 70 hectares.

Lin Bi­shan, for example, was the owner of a seven-hectare blood parrot farm until this May, when the local government offered him RMB2 million (approx. NT$10 million) for his land, quite a reasonable level of compensation.

Many Taiwanese businesspeople there, though, believe that after over a decade’s hard work and no small amount of financial outlay, it would be easier said than done to up sticks and head back to Taiwan, especially given the hard-earned success they’ve enjoyed. However, if the offer is good and won’t leave them too badly off, they might consider it.

Some of Wu’s fish farming land was taken back by the government a few years ago, and he expects the 40 hectares he has in Gui­lin­yang and near the airport to be completely gone in the next five years. Right now, he is fighting for reasonable compensation, as well as working to harness the combined power of the Taiwanese members of the industry association to get local government help in securing enough land to continue his business in another city.

Lin Bi­shan and his Taiwanese partners, for example, have leased land near a reservoir on the outskirts of the city of ­Sanya, at the far southern end of Hai­nan, and are raising blood parrots in net cages.

The Chinese authorities are eager to develop Hai­nan as an international tourism destination, and one of the main focuses of this effort is the city of ­Sanya.

The largest source of irrigation water in ­Sanya is the ­Tangta Reservoir. Lin Bi­shan and Wu Zhao­xin have partnered up to lease 330 hectares of the reservoir.

Wu Zhao­xin, a 61-year-old from Yi­lan, has vast experience of farming prawns and small abalones in Taiwan as well as, in 1992, deciding to try his hand at farming soft-shell turtles in Fu­jian. He has enjoyed times of great prosperity from his work as well as having had business ventures that incurred huge losses, such as losing RMB8 million (approx. NT$40 million) after starting an eel farm in Hai­nan in 2008 which was destroyed by torrential rains.

Lin’s business partner Wu Zhao­xin, meanwhile, has primarily focused on the most profitable type of fish in that market, the blood parrot. Looking out at the mountains that surround the reservoir from on high, one can see the sprawling area Wu works, divided up into six-by-three-meter sections, in which cages are being built. He expects the work to be complete by the end of the year, and anticipates reaching an annual production level of some 6 million blood parrots in the future.

Contrasting his farm with land-based fish farming, Wu notes that land around Sanya is extremely expensive, whereas rent on water is much more reasonable, and much less likely to be bought back. On top of that, he doesn’t need to power pumps to draw groundwater, meaning that expenses for his farm are only 20% those of a land-based one.

Moreover, with no other large-scale agricultural-use reservoirs available around ­Sanya, Wu has secured himself a prime location.

Another bonus is that in the winter, the lowest water temperature around ­Sanya is 8 °C higher than at Gui­lin­yang, meaning there is no need to artificially warm the water, thus saving even more expense.

The Taiwanese market is undeniably too small to support fish farms of such scale, nor does it have the kind of massive supporting market that Hai­nan has in the form of mainland China. This gives Hai­nan the edge in the industry.

Nor can Taiwanese businesspeople, who have been working in the Hai­nan­ese ornamental fish farming industry for at least a decade and have set down roots there, so easily turn their backs on it. And as these farmers enter their 50s and 60s, their sons and daughters all seem ready to take over the reins.

However, with land prices in China highly volatile, no-one can predict with any certainty what the next decade holds, nor whether ornamental fish farming will continue to be the apple of Hai­nan-based Taiwanese businesspeople’s eyes. And should the time come when they can no longer continue using land in Hai­nan, what happens to these ornamental fish farming entrepreneurs?