From “Fishing Man” to “Sea Protector”: A Study on the Logical Mechanism of Fishermen’s Livelihood Change—Take Wuliangsuhai Basin in Inner Mongolia as An Example

In March, 2021, China held the Fourth Session of the 13th National People’s Congress. Xi Jinping participated in the deliberation of Inner Mongolia delegation, and once again emphasized the comprehensive treatment of Wuliangsuhai Basin and the ecological situation in Inner Mongolia. This was the first time in 2019 that comprehensive ecological treatment of Wuliangsuhai was proposed, and it has attracted continuous attention at the level of the highest state authority for three consecutive years. So what happened to Wuliangsuhai Basin? What is its past, present and future trend? Will the fishery livelihoods directly related to it also change accordingly? Faced with these questions, this paper, from the perspective of natural environment and cultural adaptation in anthropology, adopts the research methods of case investigation and literature tracing, and through the investigation and analysis of the change process of fishermen’s livelihood in Wuliangsuhai watershed, Inner Mongolia, holds that livelihood is the primary problem facing human survival. Different ecological environments, resource endowments, cultural cognition and so on have shaped different ways of livelihood, changing from traditional fisheries such as fishing and reed papermaking to ecological fisheries such as protecting the sea and changing reeds into fungus. The underlying logic of the transformation is that the changes in fishermen’s livelihoods interact and restrict each other with the natural and social environment. Traditional fishermen’s livelihoods undergo transformation under the influence of factors such as natural environment, national discourse and practice, market economy, and fishermen’s main body development demands, so as to provide local experience and case studies for the construction of China’s ecological civilization in the new era.