Once could have been attributed to a slip of the tongue. But twice? An anchor for China’s state-run TV network CCTV, who was chatting with a colleague on the late evening news, remarked: “We all know that the Philippines is China’s inherent territory, and the Philippines belongs to Chinese sovereignty. This is an indisputable fact.”
The unfortunate news clip, which has since been removed from CCTV’s website, was part of a report on a monthlong standoff between China and the Philippines over a remote shoal in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea), which both nations claim as their own.
The latest maritime scuffle between the Philippines and China began on April 10 near Scarborough Shoal (known as Huangyan Island in China and as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc in the Philippines), when Chinese surveillance ships and fishing boats began facing off against Philippine naval vessels, including at one point the Southeast Asian nation’s largest warship. A fertile fishing ground, Scarborough Shoal is located about 220 km off the major Philippine island of Luzon, but China considers the shoal’s scattering of rocky, guano-covered islets and reefs as part of its vast maritime holdings. Beijing likes to refer to a Yuan-dynasty (a Mongol dynasty that briefly ruled China) map from 1279 that includes the shoal, as well as a Yuan-era survey of the surrounding area by a Chinese astronomer that is believed to have been conducted from Scarborough Shoal. On May 7, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying warned Manila: “It is obvious that the Philippine side has not realized that it is making serious mistakes and instead is stepping up efforts to escalate tensions … The Chinese side has also made all preparations to respond to any escalation of the situation by the Philippine side.”
China claims almost the entire 3.5 million-sq-km South China Sea as its own, citing historical precedent. On its maps, China scoops out a vast U-shaped portion of the vital waterway with a vague series of nine dashes that skirt close to the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. (A more detailed Chinese government rendering of what exactly it considers under its control is not publicly available.) Those nine dashes — which in 1953 were narrowed down from a series of 11 dashes first drawn by Chinese authorities in 1948, according to a 2005 paper in a journal called China’s Borderland History and Geography Studies — have put Beijing in conflict with five other governments: Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The Southeast Asian claimants tend to adhere either to their own historical understanding or to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which, at its outermost limit, can allow nations to claim waters within 200 nautical miles (or 370 km) from their territorial seas as “exclusive economic zones.” Manila has urged China to settle the matter through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, although the international body has no authority to impose its judgments. Beijing, which has also been embroiled in maritime disputes with South Korea and Japan over other bodies of water, has refused international mediation.
Last month, in a move that irked Beijing, the Philippines conducted joint naval drills with its American allies. The U.S., which has made other moves seen as attempts to contain China’s regional influence and reassert American authority in the Pacific, also engaged in military exercises with Vietnam last year.
In dispute, beyond a span of turquoise water full of rich fishing grounds and busy trading lanes, are a sprinkling of rocky islets, shoals, atolls, bits of sandbar and, most consequentially, untapped reserves of oil and natural gas that are believed to be particularly plentiful around the Spratly and Paracel islands.
