China Has Its Eye On The Philippine Islands

The Chinese Communist Party is now claiming to own the Philippine Island of Palawan, circled on this map.

If the Chinese online propaganda is to be believed, Communist China’s “Nine Dash Line” just got a makeover.^ In its latest effort to intimidate its neighbors, China is now claiming the Philippine island of Palawan (the long, thin island circled on the above map) and part of the Philippine Sea as national territory. This move has angered the Philippines but is no surprise to those of us who have followed the Chinese Communist Party’s territorial claims for years. Palawan, a beautiful dagger-shaped island in the southwest part of the Philippines archipelago, has long been attractive to tourists.

Palawan’s northwestern coast fronts the South China Sea (or the West Philippine Sea, as they call it in Manila), and is the closest territory to the disputed Scarborough Shoal, where China has been openly attacking Philippine vessels resupplying a small contingent of marines stationed on a rusting naval ship deliberately grounded there years ago to serve as a base. The shoal is well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, but the Chinese, seeking uncontested control over the entire South China Sea, have been engaging in hostilities there for several years, sensing that neither the Philippines nor the United States will do anything about it.

China’s claim on Palawan (and also the Philippines’ Sulu Archipelago and the Zamboanga Peninsula further south) is not new, and have been found on maps dating back decades. The position of China’s government is that any territory that ever belonged to any Chinese authority, or ever had been a tributary to any Chinese emperor, rightfully belongs to China. This means that China claims sovereignty over nearly all of mainland southeast Asia, Singapore, the Malaysian state of Sarawak and Sabah on northern Borneo, the western and southwestern parts of the Philippines, and all territory with Tibetan ethnic groups (including northeast India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, a substantial part of Nepal, and the Indian state of Ladakh). China also lays claim to parts of central Asia, including much of Kazakhstan and the other “stans,” all of Mongolia, and southeastern Siberia, including Russia’s Vladivostok and the Sikhote Alin region.

Some of China’s claims are based on the fact that the Yuan Dynasty (the name the Chinese gave to the Mongol conquerors) also controlled some of these territories centuries ago. Others are based on tributary agreements, or the antiquity of Chinese trading communities (on Borneo, for example, where the Chinese fought against the English who colonized the area), or in Malaysia, where primarily Chinese communist rebels drawn from large populations of miners and merchants living in Malaysia tried to communize Malaysia (1948-1960).

Nowadays, such claims do not seem terribly threatening, because Communist China has militarily been a paper tiger for so long. But times are changing. The ongoing manufacture of a new flotilla of landing craft, only recently brought to light by the Western press, suggests that the dragon does not intend to remain tethered much longer. And if it tries to prosecute its claims by force against Japan, Taiwan, or the Philippines, the United States will likely be drawn in.

NOTE: Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines are what can be called America’s barrier islands. China must get past them, whether by air or by sea, to get to the West Coast.

Thank you to the John Birch Society for their research and their constant vigilance, protecting freedom-loving people everywhere.

^The nine-dash line, also referred to as the eleven-dash line by Taiwan, is a set of line segments on various maps that accompanied the claims of the Communist Chinese Party and the Republic of China (ROC, "Taiwan") in the South China Sea.