Whose Fish Are These, Legally Speaking?

July 11, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines

Article by Whesley Samar

International Law and Historiography | West Philippine Sea Part one dismantled Beijing’s naming claims through a paper trail. Part two turns to exploration and development. History alone cannot settle this dispute, because knowing a location is not the same as owning it under international law. A nation can fish a specific stretch of water for five centuries without earning a single drop of territory. This analysis subjects all historical and archaeological evidence to that identical legal standard, refusing to grade either side on a diplomatic curve.  Three words moved on a shell game board

Sovereignty is ownership of the land feature itself, meaning the island, the rock, or the reef. States earn it through discovery, occupation, and continuous control rather than temporary fishing trips. Maritime entitlement is what that land ownership buys you afterward, specifically a territorial sea, an exclusive economic zone, and a continental shelf, all clearly defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Entitlement flows exclusively from owning land. Put simply, nobody fishes their way into an exclusive economic zone. Finally, historic or traditional rights are the smallest category of all. They require nothing close to ownership, just a documented pattern of customary use, regardless of whose flag happens to be planted on the nearest rock.

China's first to develop argument works by quietly sliding the third category into the first (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, 2000). Fish somewhere long enough, the logic goes, and eventually that activity hardens into sovereignty. It does not. Once you pull these categories apart, the rhetorical slide stops working. This is exactly the conceptual sleight of hand that the arbitral tribunal caught and penalized (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016).

Pandanan Shipwreck collections displayed at NMP Cebu. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The shard of pottery vs. the open highway

To build its civilizational case, Beijing points directly to the seabed. When Chinese state media champions historical presence, it relies heavily on the physical recovery of Chinese porcelain and copper coins from reefs across the South China Sea, framing these finds as ancient deeds of title (Xinhua, 2016). But an artifact is not an administrative document, and a sunken cargo is not a sovereign boundary marker.

The physical evidence recovered from these waters tells an entirely different story of an open, international maritime highway rather than an exclusive Chinese lake. The thirteenth century Investigator Shoal Wreck sits sunken directly within the Kalayaan Island Group, proving that regional trade routes cut straight through the contested features centuries before modern state lines were conceived. Off southwest Palawan, the eleventh to twelfth century Breaker Reef Wreck contained some of the oldest high-fired Chinese ceramics found in the region, mixed with lead and iron ingots. Discovered off southern Palawan, the fifteenth century Pandanan Shipwreck carried a massive haul of Southeast Asian trade wares from Thailand and Vietnam alongside its Chinese cargo (National Museum of the Philippines, n.d.b).

When these shipwrecks are viewed together, the first to develop the thesis collapses under the weight of its own cargo. The presence of Chinese porcelain in a Palawan wreck does not prove ancient Chinese governance, because it proves that ancient Filipinos were active, highly sophisticated maritime trading partners instead of passive consumers waiting on a shore.

Long before Western or regional empires attempted to catalog these waters, indigenous communities built seafaring into the core of their civilizations. The Manunggul Jar, a burial vessel pulled from the Tabon Caves of Palawan and dated between 890 and 710 BCE, features a lid depicting two figures rowing a boat into the afterlife (National Museum of the Philippines, n.d.a). A community does not carve vessels into its spiritual view of death unless it has already mastered those vessels in life. Centuries later, this technological mastery manifested as the Butuan Balangays, which were ocean-going, plank-built wooden watercraft dating back to the seventh century, engineered to navigate regional trade routes using indigenous astronomy and wave-pattern reading long before foreign dynastic junks dominated local waters.

An aerial view of Danjia floating fishing village in Lingshui, Hainan Province on December 25, 2023. Photo: CTGN

Where China loses, even taking its evidence at face value

Grant Beijing everything it claims about its Hainan fishermen and their generational route logs, the Geng Lu Bu (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, 2000). Believe every single syllable. The arbitral tribunal reviewed that exact evidence and ruled that it still failed to clear the legal bar for sovereignty.

Article 121, paragraph 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea holds that rocks incapable of sustaining stable human habitation or an independent economic life of their own cannot generate an exclusive economic zone or a continental shelf. Applying that precise geographic standard to the Spratlys, the tribunal found that while the features could temporarily shelter small groups, there was no indication that anything fairly resembling a stable human community has ever formed on the Spratly Islands (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016). Every single high-tide feature in the Spratlys came back legally classified as a mere rock, entitled to a twelve-nautical-mile territorial sea and absolutely nothing beyond it (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016).

The tribunal reached this conclusion by crediting the historical fishing record, not by doubting it. Seasonal fishing, however long the tradition runs, is not a settled community. Apply that same legal reasoning to historical Filipino fishing at these exact features, and you get the identical result. Neither country's fishing history proves sovereignty, because fishing history was never built to do that job under modern international law.

Prominent Chinese legal critiques forcefully dispute this reading, arguing that the tribunal misapplied the text regarding plural rocks or relied on flawed drafting histories (Chinese Society of International Law, 2018; Gau, 2019). Yet, notice the shape of what these legal critics stop short of claiming. Even China’s sharpest international lawyers do not argue that ancient Chinese fishermen established permanent, self-sustaining civilian towns on these barren rocks. Their argument is over how strict the modern legal bar should be, not over whether historical Chinese fishing activity was ever anything more than seasonal fishing activity.

Hearing in session, July 2015, Peace Palace, The Hague. Clockwise from top left: Registrar and PCA Senior Legal Counsel Judith Levine; Judge Stanislaw Pawlak; Professor Alfred H. A. Soons; Judge Thomas A. Mensah (Presiding Arbitrator); Judge Jean-Pierre Cot; Judge Rüdiger Wolfrum; PCA Senior Legal Counsel Garth Schofield; former Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, Mr. Albert F. Del Rosario; former Solicitor General Mr. Florin T. Hilbay, Counsel for the Philippines; Mr. Paul S. Reichler; Professor Philippe Sands; Professor Bernard H. Oxman; Professor Alan E. Boyle; Mr. Lawrence H. Martin. Photo: ABS-CBN

A fair fight cuts both ways

International law is deliberately indifferent to national pride, and the tribunal was explicit about this symmetry. It noted that it would reach the same conclusion regarding the protection of Chinese traditional fishing rights if the Philippines ever unlawfully blocked them from Scarborough Shoal (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016). Legally, Filipino and Chinese traditional fishing claims at the shoal stand as structural equals, because both are real, both are protected, and neither one constitutes proof of territorial ownership.

There is also an uncomfortable historical pivot worth stating plainly rather than burying away in a footnote. The Philippines' own 2012 diplomatic position on Scarborough Shoal was not originally framed around shared fishing rights. At the time, Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs stated unequivocally that the Philippines exercises full sovereignty and jurisdiction over the rocks of Bajo de Masinloc, arguing that sovereignty over the land features naturally extended to the surrounding waters (Talmon, 2016). The traditional fishing rights argument only became the centerline of the strategy once formal arbitration began. Legal scholars examining the case have flagged this shift directly, noting that Manila changed its position only for the arbitral proceedings (Talmon, 2016). This is a standard, pragmatic litigation strategy, not a scandal. States reframe arguments for different forums constantly. A serious historical analysis must name the shift rather than pretend it never happened.

An administrative map of the Philippines illustrating how its automated two-hundred-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone naturally encompasses key West Philippine Sea features based on coastal geography rather than ancient history. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The geography that needs no history

The excellent news that nobody is advertising is that the modern Philippine claim to these waters was never built to survive a historical fishing contest in the first place. It rests on ordinary, automated geography, which is a two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone generated automatically by the continuous Philippine coastline without requiring ancient maps or dynastic pottery.

The tribunal confirmed exactly this when it ruled that features like Mischief Reef and Second Thomas Shoal sit squarely within two hundred nautical miles of Palawan, placing them inside Philippine exclusive economic zone waters with zero competing entitlements from any Chinese-claimed land feature (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016).

China has no equivalent geographic fallback. Once the historic nine-dash line is set aside, and the tribunal ruled decisively that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea superseded any historic rights or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction in excess of the limits imposed by the Convention (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016), Beijing has nothing left standing except its appeals to history. That is the actual reason Chinese state rhetoric continues to circle back to medieval fishermen and ancestral pottery shards a decade after losing the legal case. It is the only argument still on its feet, because every geographic one already collapsed.

What comes next

Neither country’s ancient trade goods or fishing records decide who owns these waters. That is not a stalemate, because it is a structural fact about what historic use can and cannot prove under modern law. But presence, whether shared or contested, is still not the same thing as governing. That brings us to China's third pillar, which is continuous administration. Part three will ask what administering the West Philippine Sea has actually meant in practice for both claimants, and whether a modern paper trail of naval patrols, nature reserves, and bureaucratic decrees holds up any better than the fishing history just did. References

Chinese Society of International Law. (2018). South China Sea arbitration awards: A critical study. Chinese Journal of International Law, 17(2), 207 to 748. https://academic.oup.com/chinesejil/article/17/2/207/4995682

Gau, M. S. (2019). The interpretation of Article 121(3) of UNCLOS by the tribunal for the South China Sea arbitration: A critique. Ocean Development and International Law, 50(1), 49 to 69. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00908320.2018.1511083

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/

Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016). The South China Sea arbitration (The Republic of the Philippines v. The People's Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013 to 19, Award of 12 July 2016. https://docs.pca-cpa.org/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Award.pdf

Talmon, S. (2016). The South China Sea arbitration and the finality of "final" awards. Journal of International Dispute Settlement, 8(2), 388 to 421. https://academic.oup.com/jids/article/8/2/388/2802494

Xinhua. (2016, July 12). China refuses South China Sea arbitration award. Xinhua. https://www.xinet.com/english/2016-07/12/c_135507844.htm