In Rome this September, China brought to the world's foremost fisheries forum not only the weight of its numbers — 63.26 million tonnes of aquaculture output — but the quieter evidence of restraint: a river allowed to breathe again, a porpoise population climbing back from the edge. At the FAO's Committee on Fisheries, nations gathered to reckon with how humanity feeds itself from water, and China positioned itself as both a prolific producer and a reluctant steward learning, in real time, the cost of taking too much. The story unfolding in Rome is older than any agreement — it is the perennia