Recruitment difficulties

Ministry of Transport figures show that there were 709,000 merchant seamen in China last year, accounting for one-third of the global total.

When Nantong University in Jiangsu province conducted a survey of more than 9,000 sailors in 12 provinces and regions in 2015 and 16, more than 80 percent of respondents said the job was unattractive, according to China Ship News. The paper also said that only 30 percent of navigation graduates were willing to join the merchant fleet.

"It has been increasingly difficult to recruit seamen since the second half of 2016," said Hu Xiaohong, deputy director of Party and Mass Affairs at Shanghai Ocean Shipping Co, which manages Cosco's container fleet.

He said that before 2016 the company usually recruited about 180 trainee seamen in the first half of every year, but in the past six months it has hired fewer than 30.

That decline has also been noted at the Qingdao Ocean Shipping Mariners College in Shandong province. Yi Shanqiang, a teacher in the Navigation Department, said that in 2014 the department held 12 classes for students from Shandong, but in the past two years it has only held seven.

Both Hu and Yi said the lack of recruits was the result of the low status of sailors and poor wages, while Huang, the captain, felt it was due to insufficient government support.