Since 2012, a steady rotation of two Chinese Coast Guard vessels has effectively blockaded the traditional fishing grounds of Filipino fishermen at the Scarborough Shoal to the west of Pangasinan. The patrol has intensified, as five more vessels were spotted there a few weeks ago, according to the Department of National Defense.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP)—a Hong Kong-based broadsheet just bought by Alibaba—recently quoted an anonymous source close to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy that Beijing plans to start reclamation work this year at the atoll. The move is reportedly a reaction to the increasing closeness of the United States and Philippine military and would most likely be accelerated once the Permanent Court of Arbitration makes a ruling on the ongoing disputes this June.
Reclaiming Scarborough Shoal—known as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc to Filipinos and Huangyan Island to the Chinese—is allegedly considered by Beijing a decisive step in China’s endgame of gaining de facto control over the vital naval routes and immense natural resources of the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
Beijing says the shoal falls within its nine-dash claim, asserting that Yuan Dynasty mariners were the first who discovered it in the 13th century and had exercised jurisdiction ever since.
That assertion has no basis at all. Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio and Dr. Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, have pointed out that Chinese maps from the period do not even indicate the shoal and that the Chinese only started affixing a name to the geographic feature in 1983.
In truth, Bajo de Masinloc, later named Scarborough Shoal, has been historically associated with the Philippines, and has appeared in 17th-century European maps of Southeast Asia. Its precise location was determined during the 1792 Malaspinas Expedition, sponsored by the Spanish government. And by the 19th century, Spain already exercised jurisdiction over it and occupied it, conducting the first formal survey of the shoal in 1800.
That ownership was passed on to the Americans through the Treaty of Paris of 1898 and affirmed by the Treaty of Washington of 1900. Throughout the Commonwealth period, the US Coast Pilot Guides (US Coast and Geodetic Survey) reflected Scarborough Shoal in its navigation maps clearly within the Philippine sovereign domain and continued throughout since the Philippine regained independence in 1946. In 1963 the Philippine Navy even bombarded and dismantled a smuggler’s base discovered on the shoal. Dr. Batongbacal argued strongly that no other government action could express sovereignty so completely and convincingly than said state action.
But in addition to the Philippines’s historical title and actual possession, Scarborough Shoal clearly falls within our territory, it’s being merely 124 nautical miles or 260 kilometers away from our shorelines. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—of which China is a signatory—gives the riparian country the exclusive economic jurisdiction over 200 nautical miles from its baselines.
In the face of such incontrovertible facts, Beijing should exercise utmost restraint. Any reclamation would be a sharp stab at the hearts and stomachs of many Filipino fishermen and such brazen move could unleash widespread grassroots outrage.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.