China’s Growing Trade in Captive Cetaceans
While much of the world is phasing out the captivity of whales and dolphins, China is accelerating it.
A new report by the China Cetacean Alliance reveals an industry that continues to expand, breeding and displaying sentient beings as props for public amusement, more than 1,300 individuals, across 99 facilities, with 11 more under construction.
The findings confirm what most of us already know but few are willing to confront: ocean theme parks are not centres of education, conservation, or care. They are commercial prisons for free-living beings. They are monuments to human supremacy.
A growing empire of tanks
In 2015, China had 39 operational ocean theme parks.
By 2019, that number had doubled.
By mid-2024, there were 101 parks open, with plans for more.
This expansion is out of step with the global trend. Nations such as Canada, Chile, and India have banned or restricted cetacean captivity. Many others are dismantling it. Yet China’s industry keeps growing, and not quietly.
The most visited parks, like Zhuhai Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, attract millions of visitors every year. They parade their captives in concrete theatres, choreographed to music and applause, under the illusion of “marine education.”
But there’s nothing educational about watching someone stripped of their freedom perform for food.
Imported lives, exported integrity
The report reveals a paper trail riddled with discrepancies. Between what Japan and Russia claim to have exported and what China claims to have imported, there’s a gap of over 380 cetaceans, animals who simply vanish in trade data but exist in tanks.
According to CITES, countries have reported 970 bottlenose dolphins exported to China, but Chinese records acknowledge only 723. For Risso’s dolphins, Japan reports 114 exports, China just 49 imports.
If those numbers don’t match, it’s not a clerical error. It’s a system built on concealment. Each missing record represents a life captured, transported, and confined outside international law.
The reality is that the majority of cetaceans in Chinese facilities were taken from the wild. Torn from their families, chased by boats, dragged in nets, transported for days in slings.
Some die before arrival. Others survive long enough to become profitable.
The illusion of “breeding success”
Facilities often promote breeding as proof of “progress.” In truth, it’s the same logic that underpinned every exploitative industry in history, create more prisoners to replace the ones who die.
Since 2002, 88 births have been recorded across 33 facilities. Fifty occurred between 2019 and 2024. Yet breeding success remains low, forcing continued reliance on wild captures.
The births aren’t acts of conservation. They’re acts of replication, ensuring the show never stops.
Even more perverse is the breeding of hybrids: bottlenose–Risso’s dolphin crosses, bottlenose–false killer whale crosses. These animals serve no ecological purpose, have no conservation value, and will never return to the ocean. They are commercial novelties, designed for curiosity and ticket sales.
When life itself becomes a marketing strategy, we’re no longer talking about entertainment. We’re talking about eugenics for profit.
Life inside the tank
Cetaceans evolved for the open ocean. They travel tens of kilometres a day, dive hundreds of metres deep, and navigate vast, complex soundscapes. In captivity, they are reduced to a few metres of chlorinated water and endless repetition.
The China Cetacean Alliance found tanks as shallow as three metres, some coated in peeling paint and rust. Many animals are kept in socially incompatible groups, forced into hierarchies that provoke aggression, stress, and injury.
Investigators observed dolphins with fresh wounds and rake marks, orcas bullying smaller tank-mates, and animals circling obsessively, a symptom of psychological breakdown.
This isn’t enrichment. It’s endurance.
The report describes paint flakes, faecal matter, and detritus floating in the tanks. Even newly built facilities show corrosion and algae. Trainers control when wave machines operate, ensuring the illusion of activity only during performances.
What looks like motion is not freedom. It’s choreography under coercion.
Entertainment rebranded as conservation
Ocean theme parks market themselves as champions of education, yet they violate even their own national rules.
A 2010 government directive prohibited public contact with aquatic wildlife. Since then, the number of facilities offering “close contact experiences” has tripled, from 30 to 95.
Visitors can pay to kiss, pat, hug, or pose beside a dolphin while photographers capture the moment.
Children are led into shallow tanks for photo sessions. In some parks, people are allowed to dive or swim with the animals, often under the false promise of therapeutic value.
In the last five years, the report documented at least nine visitor injuries and nine staff injuries, including one death.
When animals retaliate or refuse to perform, they’re not dangerous, they’re resisting.
There is nothing “educational” about teaching the public that domination is acceptable if it’s wrapped in fun.
The expertise problem
Behind the smiling mascots and gift shops lies a vacuum of expertise.
Veterinarians trained in farm or companion animal care are tasked with managing complex marine mammals.
Trainers with minimal understanding of cetacean psychology rely on food deprivation to maintain compliance.
Some reports describe trainers hitting animals or withholding food to force tricks. When abuse is the mechanism, obedience is not consent.
China’s laws don’t even define “animal welfare.”
Without legal recognition of suffering, there is no standard to violate, no crime to commit, and no justice to seek.
The global outlier
Across much of the world, cetacean captivity is being dismantled.
Canada has banned it outright.
The UK hasn’t kept captive dolphins for decades.
Even the US, long the model for marine parks, is phasing out shows.
Meanwhile, China’s industry keeps expanding.
Orcas are performing at Zhuhai Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park.
New facilities in Wuxi, Dalian, and Zhengzhou are under construction to house more.
China’s image as a global leader in technology, innovation, and environmental policy collapses the moment you see an orca turning circles in a concrete pit.
A civilisation that can send rockets to space should be capable of empathy beneath the waves.
Alternatives already exist
Some parks are beginning to experiment with non-animal exhibits.
Shanghai Changfeng Aquarium, operated by the UK’s Merlin Entertainments, retired its belugas to a sanctuary in Iceland.
Haichang Ocean Park Holdings has invested in mechanical finless porpoises and animatronic whale sharks.
These technologies are proof of concept: people don’t need suffering to be entertained.
But technological novelty means nothing if the mindset remains supremacist.
Liberation isn’t about replacing live animals with machines; it’s about rejecting the idea that animals exist for our amusement at all.
The false narrative of “care”
Theme parks often present themselves as rescuers of stranded cetaceans. The data tells a different story.
Only a handful of rescue cases have been documented in more than a decade, some ending in death within days.
If rescue and rehabilitation were truly their goal, there would be records, releases, and transparency.
Instead, there’s silence.
It’s not care if the outcome is captivity.
Profit before principle
The scale of this industry is staggering.
Ocean park conglomerates like Haichang Ocean Park Holdings Ltd. report millions of annual visitors and multi-million-dollar investments.
Private equity firms pour money into expansion, because there is profit in domination.
But even the balance sheets are turning. Haichang reported a loss of 1.4 billion yuan in 2022, a reminder that this business model isn’t just unethical, it’s unsustainable.
Human fascination with control has always come at a cost.
When you build empires on subjugation, decline isn’t a question of if, but when.
A moral imperative
Every industry that commodified sentient beings, from human slavery to the fur trade, claimed to educate, employ, or entertain. Every one of them fell.
Cetacean captivity will too.
The China Cetacean Alliance lays out clear recommendations:
▫️A ban on importing wild-caught cetaceans.
▫️A public inventory of captive animals.
▫️Enforcement of existing laws against close contact.
▫️Independent welfare assessments.
▫️A long-term plan to phase out captivity entirely.
These are the steps of reform. But abolition demands more.
Because the question isn’t how to keep them better. It’s whether we have the right to keep them at all.
From captivity to conscience
We are told these animals are ambassadors for their wild counterparts. But no ambassador is taken hostage.
We are told they educate the public. But no child learns empathy by watching imprisonment.
We are told they live long, happy lives. But even the largest tank is still a cell.
The captivity of whales, dolphins, and porpoises is not a cultural preference or a tourism trend, it is a moral failure.
Each ticket sold, each clap from the stands, reinforces the idea that domination is entertainment.
Whales aren’t entertainers.
Dolphins aren’t therapy tools.
Porpoises aren’t photo props.
They are individuals, intelligent, emotional, and autonomous. And they belong in the ocean, not on display.
The tide must turn
China has the opportunity to lead, not lag. To choose compassion over commerce. To end its role as the world’s largest jailer of cetaceans.
The technology for virtual reality, robotics, and immersive education already exists. The only thing missing is the will to stop enslaving those who cannot speak our language but share our planet.
A society that prides itself on progress cannot continue to keep the sea’s most intelligent beings in tanks.
A nation that aspires to global leadership cannot build it on the backs of prisoners.
Abolition is not radical.
Captivity is.
And history will remember which side we stood on.