China dominates global aquaculture production, with a recent historic shift to becoming a net importer of aquatic products in 2022. Despite this pivotal role, the underlying drivers shaping the industry’s structure and development remain underexplored. Using a dataset of 2.77 million registered aquaculture enterprises from TianYanCha, this study examines how policies, environmental factors, and socio-economic factors influence the sector’s development, composition, and distribution. Our findings indicate that policy changes between 1985 and 2019 have led to an exponential growth in aquaculture production and the number of registered enterprises in the aquaculture sector (Figure 1). Most aquaculture facilities are clustered around the Yangtze River Basin, the Pearl River Delta, and the southeastern coast, with inland expansion along major river systems, primarily influenced by the availability of Water resources, transportation, and population density. The retail and farming sectors have the highest number of enterprises, the most active enterprises, and the highest registered capital within the aquaculture industry in China. There is a strong sectoral interdependency, as the farming sector exhibits a strong positive correlation with the processing (p = 0.77) and retail (p = 0.82) sectors. A significant bottleneck exists in the wholesale sector, which comprises only 0.8% of enterprises, suggesting concentrated market power that may compress upstream profits and distort pricing. These findings provide an evidence-based framework to guide policy and industrial optimization in China, offering a scalable analytical reference for other major aquaculture-producing countries.