Maritime expert warns against ignoring claims that Batanes belongs to China

A maritime security expert on Saturday said claims asserting China's sovereignty over Batanes should not be simply brushed aside, warning that the recent move could be used to justify Beijing's expanding presence in the strategic waters near Taiwan. "The Batanes claim needs to be taken more seriously than some are taking it. The Philippine government has been very, very clear and very strong. But I have noticed that there have been articles written in the last couple of days that seek to sort of pooh pooh this thing or say it's not a big deal," SeaLight director Ray Powell said at a news forum in Quezon City. SeaLight Foundation is a maritime transparency project at Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. The Philippines, through the Department of Foreign Affairs, has dismissed the claims as it urged the supposed Chinese scholars to instead focus on "good faith studies of the region." It stressed that the consular district of China's Consulate General in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, includes Batanes province and group of islands. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. on Thursday called claims that Batanes belongs to China, by way of Taiwan, as "baseless and ludicrous," saying all academics should immediately debunk the theory. This comes amid reports that numerous researchers from Chinese universities and institutes declared that Manila's control over Batanes supposedly lacks historical and legal basis. The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has likewise rejected the claims as these have "no rational basis in substantive research and operate from evident bad faith." It called out the supposed unanimous conclusion from an academic symposium at Jinan University in China on June 30, wherein participants reportedly asserted that Batanes is a natural geographic extension of Taiwan, thus China should exercise sovereignty over the Philippines' northernmost province. For Powell, the claims "cannot be separated from what China is doing on the water." "Since the first of June, China's Coast Guard has begun running continuous patrols east of Taiwan in to the Philippine Sea and has been framing those patrols as necessary to protect its sovereign rights and interest," he said. "This new sovereignty claim and those sovereignty framed patrols are inextricably linked. The scholars themselves were clear about this," he added. GMA News Online reached out to Chinese Embassy in Manila for comment, but it has yet to respond as of posting time. "I think the Batanes issue for the Chinese is an attempt to do something that its activities on the water demanded, but they had a very hard time justifying so they really wanted to be able to lay claim to waters east of the Basi Channel. They wanted to have patrols there and they wanted to blame it on someone else so they blame the Japan-Philippines talks and they wanted something to hang their hat to say that it was legally justified," Powell said. "The Japan-Philippines maritime talks are an entirely routine exercise under international law and norms were not the cause of this. They were the pretext. China did what it wanted to do in any way to push its patrols outside the first island chain, beyond anything it had previously claimed, beyond even its own 2023 standard map and the 10-dash line," Powell said. Also with regard to Japanese links, the NHCP addressed the supposed claim that Batanes should have been returned by Japan to China after World War II. In its statement, the NHCP said, "Japan cannot give to China what clearly belongs to the Philippines," adding that the people of Batanes had already liberated the islands from Japanese occupation in early 1945. Powell said that China's legal justification based on ownership of the Batanes island is will not "survive any kind of international scrutiny but all they really require for their narrative is enough ambiguity, enough muddling the waters so that they can say well you know it's disputed." — VDV, GMA News