Salami-Slicing the Batanes Shelf

The two-storey barracks building has a mess hall and rooms for sleeping, storage and exercise, but it is not yet furnished Photo: Al Jazeera / Nick Aspinwall

July 11, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines

Article by Whesley Samar

Governance, International Relations, and National Security  | Editorial | West Philippine Sea

Do not be fooled by the academic robes. The state-backed scholars who gathered at Guangzhou's Jinan University to declare that the Philippine province of Batanes rightfully belongs to China were not conducting an innocent history symposium: they were sketching the legal blueprints for a blockade.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. immediately identified the strategic trap, warning that this pseudo-scholarship is the active signaling of a preconceived intention by the Chinese Communist Party to expand its military control straight into the wider Pacific Ocean. In a totalitarian state where academia serves as an arm of the Central Committee, nothing happens by accident. This symposium was a deliberate, state-sanctioned assault on our cognitive domain, a calculated setup triggered directly by the historic announcement from Manila and Tokyo to launch formal bilateral talks to delimit their overlapping exclusive economic zones and continental shelves in the waters east of Taiwan. Beijing panicked at the prospect of the Philippines and Japan legally codifying their maritime boundaries, prompting them to launch a trial balloon designed to seed manufactured ambiguity where absolute clarity has existed since 1783.

Scholars at a symposium held at Jinan University argued that the Batan Islands are a natural geographical extension of Taiwan and that sovereignty belongs to China. They further stated that the proposed Japan-Philippines maritime delimitation talks concerning the surrounding waters have no legal validity under international law. Photo: The South

The Jinan University symposium laid bare the exact choreography of Beijing’s lawfare playbook, demonstrating how a geopolitical grievance is instantly converted into a manufactured territorial claim. The strategy begins with academic proxies fabricating historical folklore, such as asserting that the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Manila magically excluded territories north of the 20th parallel. They then weaponize anthropological distortions, claiming that the ancestral roots of the Ivatan people strip them of their modern Philippine sovereignty. Once these state-vetted lies are published, state media channels like the Global Times amplify the narrative to brainwash their domestic population, generating a nationalist mandate for aggression. The playbook concludes with the inevitable physical escalation, where the China Coast Guard and the military deploy hulls under the fraudulent guise of enforcing domestic jurisdiction.

Leaving these attacks on our cognitive domain unanswered allows revisionist history to take root, turning a fabricated claim into a future military flashpoint. As Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson Navy Reservist Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad pointed out, this is the systematic manufacturing of false historical and legal narratives intended to desensitize the international community, gradually alter the status quo, and establish a false pretext for future expansion. We have seen this script play out before, and the cost of ignoring the early stages of this sequence was the loss of Mischief Reef and the weaponization of artificial island fortresses in the Spratlys.

A customized Google Earth map outlining the strategic choke point of the Luzon Strait, the Batanes island chain, and the overlapping economic negotiation zones east of Taiwan. Photo: Google Earth, edited by Whesley Samar

The strategic motive behind this specific cartographic aggression is entirely transparent. Batanes commands the Luzon Strait, the vital corridor connecting the South China Sea to the open Pacific. Sitting less than 200 kilometers south of Taiwan, this island chain is the exact throat through which United States, Japanese, and allied forces must pass to break a Chinese siege during a cross-strait conflict. By fabricating a sudden claim over Batanes as a direct retaliatory strike against the Philippine-Japan maritime boundary negotiations, Beijing is attempting to insert what it considers Chinese territory between the two economic zones. If Beijing can successfully manufacture a dispute over Batanes, they claim a veto power over Philippine bilateral defense partnerships, encircle Taiwan from the south, and blind the Armed Forces of the Philippines in our own backyard.

A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Abukuma-class destroyer escort sails alongside a Pohang-class corvette of the Peruvian Navy during joint exercises in the East China Sea in 2021. Photo: Japan Ministry of Defense

We must stop reacting with defensive press releases and start answering with offensive statecraft. If Beijing wants to rewrite geography, the Philippines and its partners must lock down the terrain. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines must instantly take this fight global, partnering with international scientific bodies to publish definitive satellite and oceanographic data proving the Batanes shelf is a continuous extension of Northern Luzon, not Taiwan. We must flood international databases with the undisputed record of continuous Ivatan sovereignty, strangling China’s imperial plagiarism before it can be cited in global journals.

Simultaneously, we must aggressively operationalize the recently signed Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan, establishing permanent rotational training and joint littoral combat deployments of the Japan Self-Defense Forces directly inside Batanes. Finally, Manila must permanently homeport the five Abukuma-class destroyer escorts being transferred from Japan in newly upgraded, fortified naval bases in Basco and Mavulis Island, while coordinating under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement to position advanced US mobile anti-ship missile systems, like the Typhon system, on the islands. If Beijing's state-backed revisionists want to claim the Luzon Strait is an open invitation for empire-building, the Philippines, Japan, and the United States must answer by filling that northern horizon with an undeniable, permanent wall of allied gray hulls.