Urban spread and the growth of the middle class; declining birth rates; a growing number of single-person households; AI-enhanced marketing and delivery; supply chains; geopolitics and tariffs; a focus on convenience – but fuelled by health.
How global trends show up in Chinese seafood
Urban spread and social shiftThese global megatrends play out across the Chinese seafood market from the trust a consumer has in the health benefits of salmon to the boost that Norwegian cold-water prawns have seen in the face of Chinese tariffs on Canadian exports.
China is not just the fastest growing market for Norwegian seafood exporters but demand is so high that analysts predict it will soon become dependent on imported seafood.
By 2030, China could have 200 million one-person households.
To put its population into perspective, in 2011, as the global population tipped the 7-billion-mark, National Geographic reported that the most typical person on the planet at the time was a right-handed, 28-year-old Han Chinese man. Most incredibly, there were 9 million of them.
Fast forward to today and China is second to India, with shifting demographics that make global headlines. The January 2026 news of the viral rise of an app called Are you dead, or Sileme in Chinese, is an eye-catching example.
The app, which requires users to check in every two days to confirm they are alive, has blown up not among older people but among China’s fast-growing cohort of young people who live alone. By 2030, researchers predict China could have 200 million one-person households.
This is just on of the ways in which Chinese society is changing – and how it represents trends played out across many markets today.