Though they may look like belated pieces of legislation, the twin laws, Republic Act No. 12064 (RA 12064), or the Maritime Zones Law, and RA 12065, or the Archipelagic Sea Lanes (ASL) Law, have already rankled Chinese President Xi Jinping and caused distress to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Beijing.
Xi should relax as the Russians have raged against a recently published Chinese map that excises Russian territory in Ussuri Island, even as the moribund Chinese dynasty ceded hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory to Russia through the Treaty of Argun. Bhutan, that supposedly idyllic mountain kingdom in the Himalayas, also found China creating communities within its territory. China has territorial disputes with a total of 17 countries.
RAs 12064 and 12065 establish not only Philippine maritime zones; they establish the legal basis for the exercise of its sovereign rights in maritime areas. Moreover, these laws incorporate the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which trashed the nauseating Chinese historical claims over the vast expanse of the South China Sea (SCS), with Beijing cartographers providing the Chinese version of the name Scarborough Shoal to indicate its “historic right” to the shoal. Curiously, it was the Kuomintang regime that lodged a claim to the maritime features in SCS in 1947, saying the original 11-dash line calligraphy showed the general area where China could lay claim on islets.
A recent conference of Chinese cartographers and oceanographers was organized to conduct studies to support the territorial claims of Beijing in SCS, from the Paracels to the Spratlys and down to the Natunas, which forced Indonesia to build a naval base to counter China’s obnoxious insistence to grab territory thousands of miles from Hainan. For several decades, China failed to produce any evidence of its “indisputable sovereignty” over Scarborough Shoal while the Philippines has shown the 1734 Murillo Velarde map, which has 50 extant copies and cited it in the successful destruction of Chinese “historical claims” over maritime features covered by the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Philippines. Two other Philippine maps as well as the 1900 Treaty of Washington delineated territories covered by the 1898 Treaty of Paris between Spain and the US.
Yet, the most telling blow to Chinese revanchism in the SCS is still another map, known as the 1602 Ricci-Li map, drawn by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci with the help of the mandarin Zhong Wentao and technical translator Li Zhizao, which placed the territorial expanse of China under Ming dynastic rule. There are two copies of this map in China, one in Liaoning and another one in Hunan. Known as the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, it was the model for subsequent Chinese mapmakers. The map made the Ming rulers aware that there were 800 cities and kingdoms worldwide that China was not aware of.
So absorbed with the map, the Ming dynastic rulers displayed copies of the map in their bedrooms and told court officials to study the map. It has been said that Ricci was surprised that the Chinese asked him about the world map he had displayed in 1583 and the Ming dynasty asked him to produce a map showing China at the center of the world. This Ricci did, to the delight of Palace courtiers and the mandarins who were not aware that the Americas existed, that there were more urban centers in Europe than in China, where the dynasties plundered resources and lived in luxury while poor Chinese died in famines, or subjected to “lingzhi” for violating imperial edicts. More often than not, the dynastic rulers turned on each other, killing brothers, sons, nephews, and whoever stands in the way.
South Korea has a copy of the map, along with the University of Minnesota and the US Library of Congress. There may be other copies in the Vatican and the Jesuit order as well as former European colonial powers. One assiduous researcher compared the original copy of the 1602 Ricci-Li map with the one in the US and found out that one legend, specifically referring to the absence of any Chinese territory below the 12th parallel, was replaced by drawings of waves. This meant that the copy was a bogus map. The original had a legend which said that all territories beyond the 12th parallel did not belong to the Chinese empire.
The map, a woodcut 5 ft high and 12 ft wide, may as well be examined by Filipino and other foreign cartographers to determine once and for all whether the Chinese territorial claim is based on a forgery or a recent tweaking by Xi Jinping. Remember, China only made strong territorial claims after American wildcatters with Crestone told Beijing officials in 1997 that they may claim a wide swathe of the SCS for oil exploration. Despite the many accounts of Chinese naval achievements, much of it covers Admiral Zheng He, a Mongol, a Muslim and a eunuch who was entrenched in the Ming court in the 14th century. He sailed through the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia using Han trade routes and reached as far as Africa, Arabia and Ceylon. He did lay claim to any part of the Paracels and the Spratlys on behalf of the Ming dynasty. If there is no record of Zheng He expanding Ming Dynasty’s territory, there can be no historical claim by China over 90% of the SCS and well into the territory of the Philippines.
