After Spratlys, China out to claim Palawan - GOTCHA by Jarius Bondoc

(Conclusion)

Why China is bent on doing so is apparent for Western analysts. It is building a Great Sea Wall of defense far advanced from its mainland. Corollarily, it wants to control international sealanes in the South China Sea through which one-fourth of the world’s commercial ships pass. Of course, it also wants to exploit for itself the oil and aquatic resources of the South China Sea, even to the point of encroaching on RP territory.

The chairman of the special concerns committee of the Geological Society of the Philippines, Socrates has an idea of China’s intent. It is on a major economic push yet has no more new oil wells on the mainland to fuel its drive. The area around Palawan, meantime, has proven to be an oil mine. Its northern Malampaya well will be pumping oil to Batangas and onto Manila by 2004. China has cast an envious leer on that direction.

Socrates also has an idea of the geologic evidence that lies beneath Kalayaan Islands to legally bolster RP’s claim under UNCLOS. Centuries of geologic studies, in fact, show that the Philippine archipelago did not just emerge from underwater volcanic eruptions. It was also pushed out of the waters between what is now the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean eons ago, when the Indian subcontinent split from Antarctica and Australia and collided with Laurasia (what is now Europe and Asia). That collision millions of years back crunched up the Himalayas, which once were Laurasia’s southern seashores, and also shook its eastern shores (China). It explains RP’s strange continental shelf as an island arc. RP’s eastern shelf is narrow, and drops into the Pacific Ocean after a few hundred miles. Its western shelf, however, is far wider, evidence that tremors from the past had pushed it up as an underwater plateau. On that plateau lies Kalayaan Group, Mischief Reef, Scarborough Shoal and all of the Philippine archipelago. Beyond it farther west are deep ocean waters that then rise to another plateau, Asia’s continental shelf which China is entitled to claim as its own. Proof of these are not only in geology books, but also the latest bathymetric surveys conducted by Germany in three expeditions in the past decade.

Socrates also reveals an astounding discovery that China would have a hard time disproving scientifically. Rocks and minerals found in Puerto Princesa’s famed underground river are of the very type of rocks and minerals spread across the Kalayaan Group’s seabed – but not seen anywhere near China or ancient Laurasia. This would show that the higher rocks in Puerto Princesa form but the tip of the "iceberg" of a vast continental shelf beneath the waters around RP. But China doesn’t care about RP’s scientific evidence, more so in the absence of bathymetric surveys that UNCLOS requires. After all, it has the military evidence to show that, despite monsoon rains, mere fishermen’s vessels can enter RP waters and unload tons of steel and concrete to build forts closer and closer to Palawan. Using such "evidence," China would soon also claim the RP province by conjuring up a supposed Chinese name for it.

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