The Chinese Emperors Never Had These Waters, and Beijing Still Doesn't

A detail from the 1810 Qing Dynasty handscroll 'Pacifying the South China Sea'. The painting vividly illustrates the historical reality of China’s maritime focus: building heavily fortified coastal defenses to protect the mainland, rather than projecting imperial governance into deep ocean waters. Photo: Hong Kong Maritime Museum

July 29, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines

Article by Whesley Samar

International Law and Historiography | West Philippine Sea

Three pillars have fallen. Part One traced China's earliest documented name for Scarborough Shoal to 1935, a phonetic transliteration of a British chart entry called Sijiaboluo. That date arrives nearly two centuries after Filipino fishermen had already given the same feature a name, Panacot, recorded on a 1734 Spanish-Filipino map (Velarde, 2020).

The post-mortem of three pillars

The naming pillar fell there. Part Two turned to exploitation and development. Chinese porcelain pulled from Philippine reefs proved an open regional trading corridor, not a sealed Chinese lake, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration credited China's own fishing evidence at face value, then found it legally insufficient to generate sovereignty anyway (Permanent Court of Arbitration [PCA], 2016). Part Three turned to administration. For most of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial state was not projecting power into these waters. It was walling its own coastline off from them under the haijin prohibitions, on pain of death for anyone who tried (Ming Shilu, as cited in Hayton, 2019).

Each defeat came from evidence. This final installment does something different. It does not ask whether China's history is accurate. It asks whether China's argument even qualifies as one. It does not.

The doctrine, stated plainly

A copy of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Beijing's core jurisprudential assertion is that "historic rights" predating the convention survive its signing, a theory that directly challenges the foundational principle of modern maritime treaty law.  Photo: UN

Strip the diplomatic language away and Beijing's fourth pillar makes one specific claim: historical continuity generates sovereignty independent of, and superior to, codified international law. China's 2000 Ministry of Foreign Affairs position paper is not just listing facts about ancient fishermen. It is asserting a jurisprudential principle, that discovery, naming, and use across "the long course of history" create title predating and surviving any convention drafted afterward (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China [MFA], 2000). Naming, presence, and administration supply the evidence. "History trumps law" is the theory that makes the evidence matter in the first place. Remove the theory and Parts One through Three shrink into historical trivia. That is why the theory has to fall on its own terms, not merely alongside the facts already stacked against it.

The doctrine fails even by Its own rules

The sculpted lid of the Neolithic Manunggul Jar (890–710 BCE), preserved in the National Museum of the Philippines. It depicts a boatman guiding a soul to the afterlife, illustrating a deeply rooted maritime culture that built its spiritual world around seafaring long before any Chinese state records existed. Photo: CCP

Grant China the premise. Suppose long historical usage really does confer sovereignty, no treaty required. Run that rule honestly, and China still loses, because the record this series has built is not neutral. The asymmetry cuts against Beijing.

Austronesian maritime tradition in these waters predates any Chinese state document by centuries. The Manunggul Jar, carbon-dated to between 890 and 710 BCE, depicts figures rowing the dead into the afterlife, evidence of a seafaring culture confident enough in its boats to build its cosmology around them (National Museum of the Philippines, n.d.a). The Butuan balangays, oceangoing plank-built vessels dated to the seventh century, navigated regional trade routes using indigenous astronomy long before any Chinese record names this shoal at all (National Museum of the Philippines, n.d.b). Set that against Beijing's own published timeline: 1935 by its state media's account, 1915 at the earliest by Justice Antonio Carpio's (Yuwei, 2025; as cited in Ombay, 2024). If history is the test China wants applied, China supplied the losing figures itself.

Worse still, the Tribunal never needed to doubt Chinese fishing to reject it as sovereignty. It took the Geng Lu Bu route logs at face value and still found no stable, self-sustaining community had ever formed on the Spratly features (PCA, 2016). Article 121, paragraph 3 of UNCLOS exists for exactly this reason: seasonal, transient presence does not amount to a settled community, however many generations of fishermen pass the same route down. China does not need the Philippines to disprove its history. China's own evidence, accepted as true, already failed the legal bar. A doctrine claiming history creates title cannot then lean on a history this seasonal and this administratively hollow.

Why "History Trumps Law" is not a legal category at all

The official press release of the landmark July 12, 2016 Arbitral Award issued by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. By ruling that any claimed "historic rights" incompatible with UNCLOS were legally extinguished upon the treaty's ratification, the Tribunal made it clear that unilateral historical narratives cannot bypass modern, binding international law. Photo: Permanent Court of Arbitration

Here is the deeper problem, and it has nothing to do with which side's evidence is stronger. Sovereignty claims require opposability. A claim must be made known, precise, and open to challenge by other states in real time. Vague invocations of "ancient historic rights" fail that test structurally. Nobody can contest a boundary that was never drawn with coordinates until 1947, and revised twice after that.

This objection is not new to this series. The Tribunal addressed it directly and rejected it. Reviewing "historic title" under Article 298 of UNCLOS, it distinguished sovereignty claims over near-shore waters, like bays, from the thinner category of historic rights to resources, and found China was only claiming the latter (PCA, 2016). Then came the sentence that ends this argument before it can start. Under paragraph 246 of the Award, any pre-existing historic rights incompatible with UNCLOS are superseded by the maritime rights the Convention establishes for its state parties (PCA, 2016, para. 246; as summarized in The Diplomat, 2026). UNCLOS does not stay silent on historic rights. It is exhaustive. No residual legal space survives for a claim that predates or bypasses it, because the treaty was built to comprehensively allocate maritime rights.

China is not making a legal argument dressed in historical language. It is making a historical assertion dressed in legal language, precisely because the legal argument was foreclosed on July 12, 2016. Every appeal to "thousands of years of history" instead of a treaty provision quietly concedes that the treaty provision does not exist.

The doctrine collapses under its own weight

A map of the disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. Just as it does in the South China Sea, Beijing rejects the modern geographical boundaries of its neighbors by asserting that these islands have been "inherent Chinese territory since ancient times", proving that the "history trumps law" doctrine is not a localized exception, but a highly consistent, repeating geopolitical formula. Photo: Wikipedia

Test the doctrine for consistency and it buckles immediately. A legal principle has to apply the same way everywhere, or it is not a principle. It is a preference to wear a robe. China does not reserve "history trumps law" for the West Philippine Sea alone. It deploys the identical logic against other neighbors, and that repetition is what exposes the doctrine as opportunistic rather than principled.

Against Japan, Beijing's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has described the Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyu Islands, as having "been an inherent territory of China since ancient times," a claim of historical continuity doing the same evidentiary work the nine-dash line performs in the South China Sea (as cited in Foreign Policy, 2024). Against India, Chinese officials have justified claims to Arunachal Pradesh on the basis that the region is "Southern Tibet," using the same historical-succession logic (Foreign Policy, 2024). Different neighbor, different sea or mountain range, identical mechanism. Assert a historical connection first, let sovereignty follow as a matter of course, and treat the modern legal framework, whether UNCLOS or an agreed land boundary, as an obstacle to negotiate around rather than a rule to be bound by.

Yet China's actual conduct toward the treaty order is not principled rejection. It is selective use. Beijing ratified UNCLOS in 1996 and invoked its baseline and exclusive economic zone provisions for its own mainland and Hainan Island coastline without hesitation (United Nations, 1982). The same government that treats UNCLOS as settled law when the geography favors it treats history as the higher authority the instant UNCLOS geography does not. That is not a coherent legal philosophy applied consistently across cases. It is forum-shopping between two incompatible sources of authority, and Beijing switches forums by convenience, not by principle.

Nor can the doctrine stay quarantined to one shoal, one island chain, or one mountain range. A principle permitting historical usage to override ratified, comprehensive legal instruments would license any state with a documentable historical presence, however seasonal or contested, to override settled boundaries anywhere. China benefits from the current treaty architecture nearly everywhere except where the geography runs against it. The doctrine is not merely inconvenient for Beijing's neighbors from the Himalayas to the Spratlys. Applied consistently, as a rule rather than a rhetorical convenience, it dismantles the very system China depends on to secure its own borders elsewhere.

Beijing still doesn't

China Coast Guard vessel 5201 blasts a wooden Philippine vessel with a high-pressure water cannon. Lacking any valid treaty provision or surviving historical claim under international law, Beijing relies on raw physical intimidation and gray-zone tactics to forcibly assert control over waters it cannot lawfully claim. Photo: Reuters

The doctrine did not quietly retire after 2016. It hardened. Beijing declared the Award "null and void," dismissed it as "nothing but a piece of wastepaper," and has since followed what it calls the Four No's toward the ruling: no acceptance, no participation, no recognition, and no implementation (as cited in The Diplomat, 2026). The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, marking the ruling's tenth anniversary in July 2026 through a statement shared by its embassy in Manila, restated the same jurisprudential claim this series has now dismantled four times over, that China's sovereignty and historic rights in the South China Sea "have been established in the long course of history," citing Chinese activity dating to the Western Han Dynasty around 200 BCE as its evidence (Manila Bulletin, 2026). The vocabulary has not changed in a decade. Neither has the argument's legal standing.

What has changed is the conduct built on top of that vocabulary. Since the ruling, China Coast Guard and maritime militia vessels have repeatedly rammed, blocked, and fired water cannons at Philippine government and civilian ships operating lawfully within the Philippines' own exclusive economic zone (Indo-Pacific Defense FORUM, 2026). In September 2025, Beijing layered a "national nature reserve" designation over Scarborough Shoal, framing the move as coral conservation even as the designation extends administrative language over waters the 2016 Award already found China had no legal claim to (Indo-Pacific Defense FORUM, 2026). In March 2026, the China Coast Guard broadcast coordinates for a unilateral "clearing operation" and exclusion zone around the shoal, more than one hundred nautical miles inside Philippine waters under UNCLOS Articles 56 and 57 (Indo-Pacific Defense FORUM, 2026). None of this is administration in the legal sense Part Three already tested and rejected. It is enforcement of a claim the Tribunal found baseless, carried out by vessels rather than by argument, because the argument had nowhere left to stand.

That is the throughline connecting a fifteenth-century haijin edict to a 2026 coast guard patrol. The doctrine was never strong enough to survive scrutiny in 2016, and a decade of coercion has not made it stronger. It has only made the distance between what Beijing claims and what Beijing can lawfully demonstrate more visible.

One boat, one paragraph

An excavated pre-colonial balangay preserved in its protective enclosure at the Balangay Shrine Museum in Butuan City. These ancient, plank-built ocean-going vessels are tangible, material proof of a highly sophisticated indigenous maritime culture that was already actively navigating and trading across these waters centuries before any Chinese imperial record gave them a name. Photo: Flickr

One piece of physical evidence deserves a final word, not to relitigate Part Two, but to show the "long course of history" China invokes was never exclusively its own. The Butuan balangay, radiocarbon-dated to the seventh century and among the oldest excavated watercraft in Southeast Asia, was built by a culture already crossing this sea centuries before any Chinese document gave these waters a name (National Museum of the Philippines, n.d.b). If historical depth is the currency Beijing wants to trade in, the Philippines was already spending it before the currency existed in Chinese.

The four pillars, one verdict

Naming collapsed because China's earliest documented name for this shoal is a twentieth-century phonetic borrowing from a British chart. Exploitation and development collapsed because the shipwreck record shows an open trading corridor, and because the Tribunal credited China's fishing evidence and still found it insufficient under Article 121(3) (PCA, 2016). Administration collapsed because the haijin prohibitions show a state restricting its own coastal access for centuries, not governing distant reefs (Ming Shilu, as cited in Hayton, 2019). Now the frame holding those three pillars together, the claim that history itself outranks law, collapses too. It fails a test the Tribunal already applied in 2016, and it cannot function as a general rule without China dismantling the convention it depends on everywhere else.

Law did not have to defeat history in this dispute. China's own history, honestly read against its own record, already defeats China.

Verdict

The sea has always had a name. Fishermen off Zambales were calling this shoal something before any Chinese committee sat down with a British chart to transliterate one. That name survived contact with the historical record. Beijing's claim to history has not, and it cannot survive contact with the legal order China itself ratified in 1996 (United Nations, 1982). This series does not end by asking for more evidence. The evidence was always sufficient. China's fourth pillar was never a legal argument waiting for rebuttal. It was a historical assertion wearing a legal argument's clothes, and the clothes never fit, not in 1935, not in 2016, and not in the patrols still circling the shoal today.

Naming, exploitation, administration, and now the philosophy meant to hold them all together. Four pillars, four collapses. What remains standing after four parts of dismantling is not a rival claim to be weighed against another. It is a plain, undramatic, well-documented fact: Atin ang  West Philippine Sea.

References

Foreign Policy. (2024, March 18). China is selectively bending history to suit its territorial ambitions. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/taiwan-china-territory-claims-history/

Hayton, B. (2019). The modern origins of China's South China Sea claims. Modern China.

Indo-Pacific Defense FORUM. (2026, July). South China Sea arbitral award remains cornerstone of sovereignty, international law 10 years later. https://ipdefenseforum.com/2026/07/south-china-sea-arbitral-award-remains-cornerstone-of-sovereignty-international-law-10-years-later/

Manila Bulletin. (2026, July 13). China, tinuligsa 14 na bansang sumuporta sa 2016 Arbitral Award ng Pilipinas. https://balita.mb.com.ph/2026/07/13/china-tinuligsa-14-na-bansang-sumuporta-sa-2016-arbitral-award-ng-pilipinas/

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China. (2000). Historical evidence to support China's sovereignty over Nansha Islands. https://ph.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zt/nhwt/200404/t20040408_1334577.htm

National Museum of the Philippines. (n.d.a). Archaeology collections. https://www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/our-collections/archaeology/

National Museum of the Philippines. (n.d.b). Archaeology Division history. https://www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/our-collections/archaeology/archeology-division-history/

Ombay, G. (2024, June 16). Explainer: What is Scarborough Shoal and why is it important? GMA News Online. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/910257/explainer-what-is-the-scarborough-shoal-and-why-is-it-important/story/

Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016). The South China Sea arbitration (Philippines v. China), PCA Case No. 2013-19. https://docs.pca-cpa.org/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Award.pdf

The Diplomat. (2026, July 2). The 2016 South China Sea arbitration award at 10: Its lasting significance. https://thediplomat.com/2026/06/the-2016-south-china-sea-arbitration-award-at-10-its-lasting-significance/

United Nations. (1982). United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf

Velarde, M. V. (2020, November 13). Map rights wrongs: The 1734 Murillo Velarde map. https://upd.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/UPDate-Vol1-2-No1.pdf

Yuwei, H. (2025, October 8). GT investigates: Uncovering why Huangyan Dao belongs to China. Global Times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202510/1345156.shtml