Opinion

Bully China desperate to look nice; sue it now

GOTCHA - Jarius Bondoc - The Philippine Star

July 5, 2024 | 12:00am

China desperately wants to look good before the world. Its image is shattered. News videos have exposed the cruelty of its navy, coastguards and maritime militia. Detailed were attacks and abuses on Filipino fishermen and unarmed sailors. Even Chinese citizens witnessed the insincerity of the China Communist Party.

Now’s the time for Manila to sue Beijing in global courts.

Beijing fears any more international arbitrations. Wu Shicun, president of China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies, recently said, “We should stop the Philippines from filing another case.” As China’s guru on SCS issues, he knows they’ll lose.

Do what the enemy fears most, Sun Tzu advices: “Fight on your own terms.”

Ex-Justice Antonio Carpio outlines “four winnable cases:”

(1) Settle the Philippine extended continental shelf.

Manila has filed for a 150-mile ECS with the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. That’s in addition to the 200-mile exclusive economic zone under UNCLOS. The ECS is more than 500 miles from China’s southernmost Hainan province. Still Beijing contested it last June. Thus, by rule, UN-CLCS deferred approval.

“Let’s challenge China before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea,” Carpio says. “China’s only contention will be its concocted nine-dash line. But The Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration, under ITLOS, already outlawed that claim in 2016.”

Beijing will be in quandary. “It opposes our ECS, but can’t take the next step because it knows it will lose,” Carpio says.

Manila will simply reiterate its ECS scientific bases. Beijing will have nothing but a bogus map.

(2) Set fishing rules in Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal.

Panatag is Philippine territory within its EEZ. But China forbids fishing there, except by destructive Hainanese trawlers.

That violates the 2016 PCA verdict that Panatag is “common fishing ground” of Filipinos, Vietnamese and Chinese.

“Manila can return to the PCA for rule-setting on season, size and volume catch,” Carpio says. “The case will take less than a month to draft.”

But the effects will be long term. Panatag resources will regenerate. And China can no longer solo it.

(3) Make China pay for ravaging two other Philippine reefs.

Escorted by the CCG, Chinese maritime militia trawlers pulverized 12,000 hectares of corals in Rozul (Iroquois) and Escoda (Sabina) Shoals starting September 2023. The PCA declared those to be Philippine EEZ resources. It also chastised China for previous Philippine reef destruction.

“Let’s tap international and Filipino marine biologists to document and calculate the damage,” Carpio says. It’s the logical next step to the 2016 ruling.

(4) Demolish China’s fake territorial sea claim.

This is for the International Court of Justice. Manila can present the 1734 Murillo Velarde map that shows the Spratlys to be Philippine territory. As well, the 1898 Treaty of Paris and 1900 Treaty of Washington.

No ancient China map shows territory beyond Hainan. Its tall tale is unacceptable that a Chinese engineer-astronomer surveyed Panatag from coastal towers in the mainland – 850 miles beyond the horizon.

Not even Mao Zedong’s map shows a nine-dash boundary. China’s “great, glorious, correct helmsman” presented in 1956 a Five-Year Plan, important industrial projects map. The National Museum of China in Beijing displays that map.

The CCP Central Committee is to hold a third plenum mid-July. On agenda are flawed policies for which apparatchiks criticize CCP chairman and China president Xi Jinping. Prolonged pandemic lockdown, choking of businesses and discrimination of migrant rural workers have shrunk consumer spending and exports.

Xi ambitions a world statesman persona. But his hypocrisy invariably shows. Recently in Beijing he pleaded for an “equal, orderly world that would reject the big subduing the small, the strong bullying the weak and the rich exploiting the poor.” Isn’t China the big bully?

Xi’s subalterns lie as blatantly. As soon as CCG rams and attacks Filipino bancas, the embassy propagandizes that it was provoked. No mention of CCG trespassing of Philippine waters to begin with.

The ambassador feigns abhorrence of Philippine offshore gaming for Chinese high-rollers. But that’s only because two Chinese gambling dens in Luzon were raided for trafficking a thousand southeast Asians and Filipinos, and torturing and killing Chinese nationals.

Most pathetic was Chinese coastguards’ claim to have saved shipwrecked Filipinos near Panatag last Saturday. In truth, the Chinese barred Filipino rescuers, the victims attest.