The landmasses of Southeast Asia emerged at around the same time as the Chinese mainland. Historical records show that Southeast Asian states were also inhabited in ancient times, and not by the Chinese.
So what gives any country the right to lay claim to nearly all the waters in Southeast Asia? What should stop the countries around the South China Sea, including the Philippines, from also laying claim to nearly the entire body of water, all the way to the shores of its neighbors and southern China?
If ancient claims are to form the basis for defining modern states’ territory, China should give Tibet back to the Tibetans, who lived in peace under a theocracy in the Himalayas for millennia – with records and artifacts to prove it – until the Chinese invaded the land.
Now Beijing is using all strategies for what has been described as a creeping invasion of the waters around it, all the way to the shores of the entire neighborhood. A new atlas unveiled this week shows that the Chinese have expanded their “nine-dash-line†maritime territorial claim to a 10-dash line.
The claim would be laughable if the Chinese aren’t rushing to firm up their claims with every means available – not just by planting their flag on anything that juts out of the South China Sea during low tide, but also by creating artificial islands on fragile coral reefs and installing oil rigs in disputed waters, and then deploying armed patrols to ram foreign boats that get in their way. All this, while paying lip service to compliance with international rules including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Until the maritime disputes worsened, the Philippines had been one of China’s closest friends, with ties in almost all aspects of life going back to ancient times. The two lands enjoyed peaceful co-existence long before Spanish colonizers arrived. These close ties and shared history are now threatened by unreasonable territorial claims emanating from a misplaced sense of national entitlement.