In January 2021, China did something ambitious.
The government imposed a 10-year commercial fishing ban across the entire Yangtze River — its main stream, its major tributaries, and its connected lakes. The Yangtze is the world's third-longest river and the most biodiverse freshwater ecosystem in Asia. It had also been decimated. Decades of industrial fishing, pollution, and boat traffic had collapsed fish populations, pushed the Yangtze finless porpoise toward extinction, and driven the Yangtze River dolphin — the baiji — to functional extinction decades earlier.
Five years into the ban, the results have exceeded almost every projection.
Fish biomass in the main stream has doubled compared to pre-2020 levels. Monitoring between 2021 and 2025 recorded 351 fish species across the river basin — an increase of 43 species compared to before the ban began. In 2024 and 2025, the Chinese high fin banded shark reproduced naturally for the first time in over two decades, a moment scientists had not dared to expect.
But it is the Yangtze finless porpoise — China's only remaining freshwater cetacean — that has become the symbol of the river's comeback.
Once numbering around 2,700 individuals in the early 1990s, the population had collapsed to just 1,012 by 2017. The species was spiralling. A 2025 survey put their numbers at 1,426 — an increase of 177 from 2022, and the first genuine, sustained recovery the species has seen in modern records.
Observations of porpoises surfacing and playing near cities like Wuhan and Nanjing — once almost unheard of — have become increasingly common. The river is returning to life in ways that are visible to ordinary people.
"The Yangtze finless porpoise is a barometer of the river's overall ecological health," researchers note. The porpoise is thriving because the fish are thriving. And the fish are thriving because, for five years, humans have simply let the river be.
China's goal is to grow the wild porpoise population to 1,700 by 2030 and 2,000 by 2035. Based on current trends, those targets look achievable.
Sometimes the most powerful conservation tool isn't technology, funding, or captive breeding. Sometimes it is restraint — the decision to stop, step back, and give a river room to remember itself.
The Yangtze is remembering. 🐬