TENSIONS have flared up once again in Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) over the discovery of a semipermanent floating Chinese platform inside the shoal’s lagoon.
Measuring about 6 by 6 meters, the platform has a newly installed antenna and has been observed carrying Chinese personnel. Maritime surveillance has also discovered newly laid buoys, unidentified floating objects, and an antenna mounted directly onto a rock near the shoal’s entrance.
The installation of this platform has been accompanied by a massive surge in Chinese hardware and aggressive gray-zone tactics.
What’s particularly worrisome is the platform mimics the early stages of China’s previous island-building playbooks, in which it starts with a small “floating structure” or “nature reserve” and gradually dredges it into a fully fortified, militarized artificial island.
China effectively seized de facto control of Bajo de Masinloc from the Philippines in 2012 through a broken agreement.
On April 8, 2012, a Philippine warship intercepted eight Chinese fishing vessels inside the shoal. Armed sailors boarded them and found illegally harvested giant clams, coral and live sharks.
Before the Philippine Navy could arrest the fishermen, however, Chinese maritime surveillance ships arrived and physically blocked the Philippine warship. A tense naval standoff ensued.
By June, with both sides deadlocked, the United States brokered a verbal gentleman’s agreement: both the Philippines and China would withdraw their vessels to defuse the situation and talk it out later.
The Philippines honored the deal and recalled its ships, but China did not leave. Instead, Beijing kept its ships in place, erected a rope barrier across the mouth of the shoal’s lagoon, and assumed total physical control.
Frustrated by losing the shoal, the Philippines eschewed military conflict and sued China in 2013 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or Unclos. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague issued a historic, unanimous ruling overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines, saying China had no historic rights to the shoal, which was firmly inside Philippine waters.
The court also ruled that China broke international law by physically blocking Filipino fishermen from accessing their traditional fishing grounds.
China completely ignored the international court ruling, however, calling it a mere “piece of scrap paper.”
In 2021, our president at the time, Rodrigo Duterte, used similar words to denigrate our own legal victory. In a nationally televised address, he said in Filipino: “In real life, that paper is nothing. ... In the language of hoodlums, I will tell you, give it to me and I will tell you: [expletive], that’s just paper. I will throw that away in the wastebasket.”
This same spirit of appeasement was apparent in 2019, when a Chinese maritime militia vessel rammed and sank a stationary Philippine fishing boat, the Gem-Ver 1, near Recto Bank within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), leaving 22 Filipino fishermen abandoned in the open sea.
Amid immense national outrage, Duterte echoed Beijing’s attempts to brush off the incident. He publicly dismissed the sinking as a “little maritime accident” and cautioned Filipinos against escalating the situation, telling the public: “Do not believe the politicians who want to send the navy.”
In March 2021, over 200 Chinese maritime militia vessels swarmed and effectively blockaded Whitsun Reef (Julian Felipe Reef), which sits squarely inside the Philippine EEZ.
In March 2021, when then-defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana and then-foreign affairs secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. issued fierce daily protests over 200 Chinese maritime militia vessels that swarmed around and blocked the reef inside the Philippine EEZ, Duterte issued a gag order prohibiting his Cabinet members from speaking publicly about the South China Sea dispute.
This historical context is particularly relevant today as the Senate is racked by internal strife instigated by a faction loyal to the former president. The chaos wreaked by this faction comes as the Senate prepares to constitute itself as an impeachment court to try the former president’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, who, if elected president in 2028, will most likely reverse the current administration’s policy of standing up to China and revert to her father’s policy of appeasement.
Over recent years, there has been substantial, documented evidence of Chinese interference in domestic Philippine politics, and the issue has reached the halls of the Senate. One member of the pro-Duterte bloc, in fact, not only echoes Chinese talking points but has also gone on record as suggesting we give up the Kalayaan Island Group in Palawan to China. This same senator has insisted that the Philippines has no clearly defined EEZ and that there is no such thing as the West Philippine Sea.
The power struggle in the Senate is often painted as the result of one man’s ambition to cling to the title of Senate president. The repercussions, however, are much deeper than that.
