Zixuan Ma, Hao Xu, Richard Newton, Anyango Benter, Dingxi Safari Fang, Chunhui Wang, David C. Little, Wenbo Zhang
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector globally. As its largest producer, China plays a pivotal role in ensuring aquatic food supply and supporting the blue economy. Despite its massive scale, a systematic understanding of the geographic distribution, structural composition, and drivers of China’s aquaculture value chain remains limited. We comprehensively characterized the sector’s composition, spatiotemporal evolution, and structural dynamics. We compiled and analyzed over 2.85 million enterprise registration records from the TianYanCha database, applying rigorous industry classification, spatial mapping, correlation analysis, and bottleneck assessment with natural and socioeconomic variables. Results show that policy reforms, notably the 2013 Company Law amendment and 2016 aquaculture certification measures, drove sharp increases in enterprise registrations, particularly in retail and farming. Enterprises are highly clustered in the Yangtze River Basin, Pearl River Delta, and southeastern coast, with inland expansion along major river systems. Strong interdependencies exist among sectors, while wholesale remains numerically scarce, forming a structural bottleneck. Standardization levels are low. Foreign investment, though under 5%, concentrated in processing and distribution, contributed to advanced technologies in the 1990s–2000s. These findings highlight rapid formalization, regional clustering, and structural imbalances, suggesting that enhancing formalization and addressing intermediary bottlenecks could improve sector resilience and efficiency.