The incident took place in the early hours of the morning and rescue efforts are underway.
A Chinese fishing boat has sunk in the Indian Ocean and all 39 Chinese and international crew members are missing, state media said.
Broadcaster CCTV said the incident happened in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The crew includes 17 people from China, 17 from Indonesia and five from the Philippines, the report said.
President Xi Jinping ordered a coordinated search, CCTV said, but “no missing persons have been found so far”.
China has deployed two commercial ships to assist in the regional search and rescue operation.
“It is necessary to further strengthen the safety management of fishing vessels at sea and take preventive measures to ensure the safety of maritime transport,” said Premier Li Qiang.
The Chinese reports did not identify the exact location of the sinking, revealing only that it occurred in the middle of the Indian Ocean, stretching from South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa and Western Australia.
The Philippine Coast Guard said on Wednesday it was monitoring the situation and coordinating with the Chinese embassy in Manila and with search and rescue teams operating near the ship’s last known location.
The Lupenglaiyuanyu No. 8 boat was based in the eastern coastal province of Shandong and operated by Penglai Jinglu Fishery Co, one of China’s largest state-owned fishing companies.
According to North Pacific Fishing Commission records, it was authorized to fish for neon flying squid and Pacific saury.
The boat left Cape Town, South Africa, on May 5 and was bound for Busan, South Korea, according to the MarineTraffic tracking website, which last placed the ship on May 10 southeast of Réunion, a small French island in the Indian Ocean. .
China is believed to operate the world’s largest deep-sea fishing fleet. Many of its ships remain at sea for months or even years at a time, supported by Chinese maritime security services and an extensive network of support vessels.
Meanwhile, the Philippines supplies about a quarter of the world’s 1.2 million seafarers.
There was no explanation for the cause of the sinking, although weather and high seas often play a role in such tragedies.
According to a report released in 2021 by a watchdog group based in Norway, Chinese squid fishing vessels have been documented using wide nets to illegally catch already overfished tuna as part of an increase in unregulated fishing activities in the Indian Ocean. The report highlighted growing concerns about the lack of international cooperation to protect marine species on the high seas.
The group, called Trygg Mat Tracking, found that the number of squid vessels in the high seas of the Indian Ocean – where fishing for the species is unregulated – has increased sixfold since 2016.
The United States Coast Guard was involved in a dangerous confrontation with Chinese vessels in 2022 not far from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands during a mission to inspect the vessels for signs of illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing.
Chinese fishing fleets sometimes go “dark” – turning off their tracking systems to prevent their activities from being tracked.