By Focus | 2026-07-15

Manila's swift rejection of a Chinese symposium's territorial claim over Batanes province has prompted a broader debate among maritime security analysts over whether Beijing is opening a new legal front in its contest for influence over the waters east of Taiwan.

The claim originated at a June 30 symposium at Jinan University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China, where participants concluded that the Batan Islands are a "natural geographical extension" of Taiwan and therefore belong to China.

Ju Hailong, dean of the university's School of International Studies, said the islands fall outside the boundaries established by the 1898 Treaty of Paris and the 1946 Treaty of Manila.

Wanting the 'whole Pacific Ocean'

Manila wasted no time in replying.

"The Philippines' sovereignty over Batanes is settled and not up for debate," Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Analyn Ratonel said.

"It also validates what we've been saying -- that they have a plan to control the whole Pacific Ocean," Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said in Pasay City. "We know there is no basis for this. It's a joke. It's ludicrous."

"[The claim has] no rational basis in substantive research and operates from evident bad faith," the National Historical Commission of the Philippines said. National Security Adviser Eduardo Oban Jr. said the government could not afford to "ignore how false narratives can be repeated to manufacture ambiguity where none exists."

'Inextricably linked'

The symposium should be viewed alongside China's growing activity in the waters east of Taiwan, said security analysts. "[This] cannot be separated from what China is doing on the water," said Ray Powell, executive director of Stanford University's SeaLight maritime transparency project. China Coast Guard vessels began continuous patrols east of Taiwan and through the Bashi Channel in early June, weeks before the symposium convened, he said.

"This new sovereignty claim and those sovereignty-framed patrols are inextricably linked. The scholars themselves were clear about this," Powell said.

He described the symposium as part of a broader lawfare strategy that uses legal and historical sophistry, rather than naval assets, to justify expanded Chinese activity in the strait.

Such contentions could "seep into official discourse" if they resonated with nationalist sentiment inside China, Collin Koh, a senior fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, tweeted, even though he dismissed the scholarship's rigor.

Baseless Chinese opinions

Legal scholars and anthropologists rejected the scholarly opinions presented at the symposium. Beijing's account of the region's history is unlikely to withstand scrutiny under international law, Jay Batongbacal, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law, told the Inquirer, noting that China never has raised it before an international tribunal.

Batanes' roughly 10,000 Ivatan residents share cognate vocabulary, customs and dwelling styles with Taiwan's Tao people, Wang Yuanyuan, a research fellow at China's National Institute for South China Sea Studies, said at the symposium. She cited a 2023 survey that, according to her, showed their ancestors migrated from Taiwan 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

In a July 12 Facebook post, Filipino cultural anthropologist Nestor Castro said Ivatan and the Tao language both belong to the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family, which includes nearly every language spoken in the Philippines but excludes Chinese.

"The languages spoken in mainland China are not Austronesian," Castro wrote, saying that by Beijing's own logic, the linguistic connection would give the Philippines a stronger claim to Orchid Island (a Taiwanese island southeast of Taiwan's main island) than China has to Batanes.

Castro challenged the migration timeline, saying Austronesian-speaking peoples reached Taiwan about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and the Philippines about 4,200 to 5,000 years ago, long before China emerged as a state. "Are Austronesians Chinese? No!" he wrote, adding that Lanyu's Tao people identify as Tao rather than Han Chinese.

Beijing's Foreign Ministry has not formally endorsed the symposium's conclusions, and neither the Jinan University report nor subsequent state media coverage indicates an official change in China's position on Batanes.

The dispute comes as the Philippines marks the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling on the South China Sea and shortly after Manila and Tokyo announced plans to negotiate their maritime boundary in waters east of Taiwan. The PCA threw out China's claim to more than 80% of the South China Sea.

The episode illustrates how historical and legal narratives can become part of broader strategic competition, even without a formal shift in Beijing's policy, say analysts.