Suspected Chinese Dive Instructor Filmed Shooting a Protected Turtle in Raja Ampat
A video of a scuba diver shooting a critically endangered hawksbill turtle with a speargun in Indonesia's Raja Ampat islands — reportedly to cook and eat it — has flooded Chinese social media, where the diver is suspected of being a Chinese diving instructor. Chinese divers are leading the condemnation of a killing that broke Indonesian law and the norms of their own sport at once.
The video that has consumed China's diving community since the weekend was filmed in the pale-blue channels of Raja Ampat, the Indonesian archipelago famous as the planet's richest reef system. It shows a diver on scuba, carrying a speargun, shooting a hawksbill sea turtle. Within days, word spread that the turtle had been pulled up, cooked and eaten. The hashtag reading "suspected Chinese instructor shoots hawksbill in Indonesia" trended on Weibo, and the mood in the comments was not defensive but furious — much of it from Chinese divers themselves.
The anger has a legal spine. Indonesia bans spearfishing on scuba outright — the combination is considered too efficient, a way of strip-mining a reef rather than fishing it — and has protected the hawksbill since 1999, under the government regulation on plant and animal species conservation. The species is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN, and in China it carries the country's own highest tier of protection as a first-class protected wild animal. In the Pianemo area where the shooting took place, local indigenous communities that co-manage the reefs have written to police, according to a Chinese account following the case, to push for an investigation.
"In recent days this video has flooded the diving world," wrote one Chinese diving commentator in a post liked nearly 13,000 times, walking readers through each layer of the violation: the scuba spearfishing ban, the species protections, and the fact that the hawksbill is the one sea turtle whose flesh is documented as poisonous to eat — rendering the reported feast not just illegal but dangerous. "Whether it's scuba spearfishing or killing a protected animal, there's no place where that's acceptable" (在哪都说不过去), another poster summed up.
One caution hangs over the story: the diver's nationality is unconfirmed. The "suspected Chinese instructor" framing comes from accounts in the Chinese diving community itself, and posters have been careful to keep it there — the condemnation targets the act, not yet a named person or country. That restraint has not stopped a wider reckoning, because the case lands on a sore subject: China's outbound travel boom has filled Southeast Asian dive boats with newly certified Chinese divers, and episodes of tourists touching reefs, harassing marine life or ignoring local rules have became a recurring genre of self-flagellating viral news. Raja Ampat, reached through Indonesian dive resorts that brief every guest on the rules, sits near the top of the bucket list.
What happens next is up to the Indonesian authorities, who can charge the diver under the 1999 conservation regulation regardless of nationality; the species also falls under CITES, the international treaty on trade in endangered species. For China's diving world, the faster question is reputational. The community's own verdict came through in the trending hashtag's comments, where certified divers traded stories of dive briefings ignored and called for the industry's Chinese-language training materials to say plainly what one poster felt the need to explain to a million readers: a hawksbill is not dinner, and on scuba, nothing is.