On July 13, 2024, the Chinese Embassy tried to delude itself that it owns the Spratlys, the Ayungin Shoal and the Panatag Shoal owing to its 9-dash-line calligraphy sketched in 1947 aboard a US Coast Guard cutter by a Kuomintang oceanographer for the benefit of the Republic of China that is now administering Taiwan.
To counteract the 8th anniversary of the 501-page arbitral award to the Philippines by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague, the embassy issued its usual prevarication, calling the July 12, 2016 ruling affirming Philippine sovereign rights over the West Philippine Sea (WPS) as “a political circus dressed up as a legal action.” It accused the arbitral tribunal of exercising its jurisdiction “ultra vires,” or without authority and its ruling is thus illegitimate.
So, China’s yapping must be “intra vires” on the basis of the 1947 calligraphy (call it shufa or fashu in Chinese) and that this sketch constituted a “historical claim” by the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? Under what authority is the Chinese Embassy is talking about its “indisputable sovereignty” over all the maritime features found within the Philippine extended economic zone (EEZ.) The 1947 sketch, rather than the documents, maps and scholarly treatises that they are fabricating posthaste to provide legal legs to their doomed claim, is meritless.
China should start eating reproductions of the 9-dash-line, which was sketched under the authority of the Kuomintang regime that retains ownership over the claim, no matter how ahistorical it is, and no matter how irrelevant and meaningless it is in the context of the 1982 United Nations Covenant on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that both the Philippines and China signed, making it binding for both countries. China cannot question the legitimacy of the PCA, or the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which are authorized by UNCLOS to issue awards and entitlements in maritime disputes.
What China wants is to force the Philippines to engage in negotiations, during which it can use the stick and carrot to compel the Philippines to acquiesce. The PCA ruling is in black and white but China wants to delete it from history, just as China threw away the Hong Kong handover treaty into the sewers of Beijing. Rather than act haughtily as if Chinese laws extend the metes and bounds of Beijing’s territory, China should just open its eyes and see that maps ineluctably show that China cannot have any overlapping entitlements with the Philippines. China’s continental shelf does not extend beyond Hainan province, where all its maritime claims should stop.
China did not contest the Philippine case filed in 2013, for which reason it had waived its rights, so why is the embassy perorating anew? China knew it has no valid claim to the maritime features but it is no saber-rattling like a true paper tiger. The PCA gave China a short shrift in 2016 by declaring that the fancied 9-dash-line has no “legal basis” and a 1947 sketch by an oceanographer cannot overturn the documents, maps and scientific studies that showed the maritime features that Beijing claimed were nearly 1,000 kilometers away from Hainan.
The PCA said that the “tribunal found that it could — without delimiting a boundary — declare that certain sea areas are within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines, because those areas are not overlapped by any possible entitlement of China.” In short, China is wasting its precious time yakking about its imaginary historical claim. Lately, however, China has ordered 100 scholars to produce evidence to sustain Beijing’s claim to Panatag and Ayungin Shoals. That is much like Donald Trump ordering Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to produce 11,780 ballots to overturn the result of 2020 elections in which Trump was drubbed by President Joe Biden. The Chinese Embassy should do better than anchor Beijing’s claim on the indefensible 1947 sketch.
So, the mighty dragons of Xi Jinping, said the Philippines “clings” to the illegal rule at the expense of its relation with China, unlike the previous administration that cringed at the sight of Chinese overlords. “The Philippine side clings onto this illegal, invalid arbitral award at the expense of its relations with China. By aligning itself with the US and some other Western countries on the SCS issue, the Philippines joins the small circle of the West ganging up against China,” it said. This is arrant nonsense. It is China that is squatting in Philippine territory. Just to remind the Beijing kingpins, Filipinos defended Manila when 30,000 Chinese pirates under Limahong invaded in 1574, turning Manila Bay’s waters into red. Limahong repeated his misdeed in 1589 but had to squirrel away to Pangasinan with his decimated forces.
