China formalizes control of Scarborough Shoal
Last of two parts
JUST two days after President Marcos, Jr. signed into law the 2024 Maritime Zones Act, which he said “aligned our laws with the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea” (Unclos), China tightened and formalized its control of Scarborough Shoal, which President Aquino III lost in 2012* after being fooled by the US into leaving it during a stand-off with the Chinese.
It is a development that is a seismic shift in Asia’s geopolitics: China now officially has an island closest to the Philippines, which it can transform into a military facility. Scarborough would be its territory farthest from the Chinese mainland.
The Chinese formalized it by issuing the geographic coordinates for the baselines of the shoal (which it calls Huangyan Dao; Bajo de Masinloc to us) as defined by Unclos’ Section 2.
Other than serving to officially mark an island’s or an archipelago’s territory — analogous to a real estate’s property line designated by geographical coordinates — these reference lines along its coast are the basis for the owning nation to determine the breadth of its territorial sea, which is 12 nautical miles seaward from the lines, simply the maritime time component of its territory. Some 200 nautical miles from these same baselines is an island or a country’s exclusive economic zone, which, while not part of its sovereign territory, gives it exclusive rights to explore its resources.
Huangyan Dao’s EEZ occupies half of the Philippines’ EEZ (see map) in what it calls the West Philippines Sea. When, and if, China in the future declares the baselines for Nansha Qundao (its name for most of the Spratly Islands) or just for one of the islands it occupies there, such as Mischief Reef, the EEZ for these will overlap with another half of the Philippines’ EEZ. The Maritime Zones Act will be rendered useless in the face of a stronger nation — China — likely to enforce its own domestic laws.
EEZ
If China insists that these two zones from Scarborough and Mischief make up its EEZ, which it will enforce through its Coast Guard, we’re fucked: The Maritime Zones Law will be useless. The West Philippine Sea that Aquino III created will, in effect, be Chinese waters, which it will relentlessly patrol, given China’s well-known sense of nationalism, the result of its “century of humiliation” in which Western imperialists and Japan occupied many Chinese territories.
There are many precedents for tiny features claiming 200-km EEZs measured from their baselines. Japan’s Okinotorishima Reef has a land area of just 9 square meters or about the size of a bedroom. Japan claims that this tiny reef has an EEZ of 430,000 sq km, which it has vigorously defended as such. (See photo and image)
A way out of this problem of overlapping EEZs is seemingly provided in Section 12 of the Maritime Zones Act: “Where the maritime zones defined in this Act overlap with the maritime zones of a neighboring State, the common boundaries shall be determined by agreement with that State in accordance with the relevant principles of delimitation under international law, including the Unclos.”
In a piece of wishful thinking, the Act specified: “Where no agreement has been reached within a reasonable time, the Philippines may resort to the procedures provided under part XV ‘Settlement of Disputes’ of Unclos.”
It is unlikely, though, that China will agree to a procedure under Unclos that would decide on a delimitation of the two countries’ overlapping EEZs. When it joined Unclos in 1996, it submitted a qualification that the treaty could not decide on questions of China’s sovereignty in the South China Sea.
Thanks to Presidents Aquino III and Marcos Jr.’s belligerence toward China and Marcos’ moves to provoke China to formally assert its sovereignty, Scarborough Shoal is now the Chinese-held territory closest to the Philippines, which it could easily transform into a military complex built on an artificial island, as it has done in all the seven reefs in the Spratlys that it controls. Marcos Jr. has even given China a compulsion to do that since he has allowed US temporary military bases to house American middle-range missiles that could reach its islands in the Spratlys.
Flashpoint
Before Aquino made the shoal a flashpoint in the country’s dispute with China, the question of its ownership had been shelved, with fishermen from China, the Philippines and Vietnam fishing freely around it and its lagoon. After the stand-off that Aquino provoked and his blunder in ordering our vessels to abandon Scarborough, tricked by the US, the Chinese have tightly controlled the area, either through its coast guard and the People’s Liberation Army Navy vessels as well as many of its fishermen’s boats acting as a militia.
Scarborough Shoal is the first territory the Philippines has lost (other than Sabah) since its independence. It is now the foreign-occupied territory closest to our mainland, being 240 km from Subic Bay in Zambales and 300 km from Malacañan Palace in Manila.
Tragically, most international law experts’ analysis was that our sovereignty argument over the Scarborough Shoal was the strongest among our other claims since it was not part of the Spratlys’ very complicated territorial disputes. While the shoal is indisputably outside the Philippines’ territory as defined by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1898 and other international treaties, the Philippines had effectively controlled it through its colonial master, the US, since the end of World War II, one of the accepted means for determining sovereignty. The US military from its Subic Bay Airbase even used it as a gunnery range for its fighter planes, especially during the Vietnam War.
Bungling
If not for Aquino III’s bungling and now Marcos Jr.’s Maritime Zones Act that prodded China to formalize its control of Scarborough, we could have, in negotiations with China over our disputes in the Spratlys, insisted that it revert the shoal’s control to us, in exchange, for instance, for our recognition of its sovereignty over the seven features it has controlled since the 1970s.
All that is water under the bridge now, and the path of reason for us to jettison Marcos’ quarrelsome attitude towards China, fire Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. together with the military top brass who have become brainwashed American minions supporting that superpower’s agenda to contain the Asian superpower and arrive at a cooperative stance with it. If we do not go this path, it is almost certain that China will similarly declare not just the baselines of Mischief Reef but of Nansha Qundao, its name for the entire Spratlys.
If we don’t do this, we will see in our lifetime Scarborough Shoal being transformed into a vast military complex similar to those in the seven artificial islands occupied by China and a permanent target of US nukes, whose fall-out would easily reach our mainland. If the US tries to stop China from doing that, we will be facing a nuclear Armageddon.
*A detailed and documented account of this episode discussed in several of my past columns as well in my book “Debacle: The Aquino regime’s Scarborough fiasco and the South China Sea arbitration deception.” Available in rigobertotiglao.com/debacle, amazon.com, and Fully Booked
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China formalizes control of Scarborough Shoal
Source: Breaking News PH
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