On Monday, the US raised the stakes, saying “Beijing’s claims to offshore resources” across most of the disputed seas were “completely unlawful”.
South China Sea tensions prevail ahead of The Hague ruling (2:31) The former Philippine Supreme Court justice also presented official Chinese records that debunk Beijing’s “historical maritime rights” over the South China Sea – thereby raising new questions about its standing in the region as tensions escalate. “All the scholars all over the world are unanimous: Zheng He never visited the Philippines,” Antonio Carpio said in an online lecture earlier this month, calling Xi’s anecdote “totally false”. The problem is that the evidence suggests Zheng never set foot in the future Philippine islands. It was also a way for Xi to bolster China’s claims in the South China Sea – based on its “nine-dash line” and long contested by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.
The suggestion was that China had been in contact with the archipelago long before Europeans arrived and named it Las Islas Filipinas after Spain’s King Felipe II. In a published message to Filipinos just before his trip, Xi recalled how, more than 600 years ago, Chinese explorer Zheng He “made multiple visits to the Manila Bay, Visayas and Sulu” areas during his “seven overseas voyages seeking friendship and cooperation”. Having secured an alliance with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during a state visit to Beijing in 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined it when he visited Manila in 2018, promising a new chapter in the two nations’ diplomatic ties and vowing to turn the disputed South China Sea into “a sea of peace”.
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