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They don’t call them the “Fishing” islands for nothing, it seems. The territory at the centre of the protracted Sino-Japanese-Taiwanese islands dispute is known as Diaoyu in Chinese, which means fishing, and now Beijing is making sure that Chinese citizens get a taste of the islands – just in time for Chinese New Year when fish is usually high on the menu.

Shanghai residents will on Saturday be able to taste fish – including the highly prized, if unfortunately named, “rubber fish” – caught in the waters off the (best left unnamed) islands as part of a food fair organised for lunar new year.

According to the Shanghai Daily – a paper with close links to government – fishermen are delighted to be able to fish in those waters again, after being encouraged to do so by the Chinese authorities.

The story appeared in the same edition of the paper which had on its front page a picture of a water duel between a Japanese coast guard ship and a Taiwanese fishing boat carrying Taiwanese activists to the islands.

The Chinese fishermen who brought their bumper catch to Shanghai “worked under the protection of China’s coast guard and fishery administrative vessels” when catching tuna, cuttlefish, mackerel and “green horse-faced puffer fish”, known as rubber fish, Shanghai Daily said. The paper said the fishermen could make twice as much money fishing there as in waters closer to the Chinese mainland.

“We hope more Chinese people will love our Diaoyu Islands from loving its fish,” the food fair organiser told the FT in a telephone interview. Fishermen praised the disputed fish, saying they were “big, delicious and not polluted”. In China these days, that is saying something – though one microblogger on Sina Weibo asked “Does these seafood really come from the Diaoyu Isands and have no smell of gunpowder?”

Additional reporting by Yan Zhang

Related reading:
Return of warlike rhetoric from China, FT
Japan and China struggle to curb tensions, FT