Philippine Gov't is Alarmed by Claims of Chinese Sovereignty Over Palawan

The Philippine government is used to provocative statements from China's state-owned media empire, but has expressed alarm at a new theory circulating on  tightly-monitored Chinese social media: the newly-created concept that Palawan, one of the Philippines' home islands, is actually part of China. 

To date, all of China's expansionist claims in the South China Sea have been focused on reefs and small islands, most of them uninhabited. If the anonymous comments on Chinese social media were transformed into policy, Palawan would be the first major piece of inhabited sovereign territory that China has claimed in the Philippines. Though new, such a claim would be consistent with China's foreign policy objectives: Beijing has laid similar historical claim to Tibet, Taiwan and parts of northern India.

If the new Palawan claims were promoted on open-access Western platforms like X or Facebook, Manila would likely have little cause for concern. But since the Chinese internet is tightly governed and subject to rigid censorship, and China has allowed the Palawan claims to stay posted online, the Philippine government has reacted with alarm. 

"We categorically reject the baseless and revisionist claims circulating on Chinese social media that Palawan was historically part of China and should be returned to it," said Philippine National Security Adviser Eduardo Año in a statement. "Palawan has always been and will always remain an integral part of the Republic of the Philippines. No historical record, legal precedent or credible evidence support the claim that Palawan was ever under Chinese sovereignty."

The claim on Chinese social media suggests that Palawan is "Zheng He Island," named for the 14th-century Chinese explorer Zheng He. Año noted that there is no historical evidence that Zheng He visited Palawan, nor any sign of Chinese settlement in the province. "These false narratives, proliferated through digital disinformation and information warfare tactics, appear to be part of a broader effort to undermine Philippine sovereignty," Año warned. 

The "Zheng He" theory would extend China's ambitions beyond the boundaries of the well-known "nine-dash line" policy, Beijing's historically-derived claim to almost all of the South China Sea. The nine-dash line covers most of the Philippines' western exclusive economic zone, along with large sections of the Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Bruneian economic zones. An international court invalidated the basis of that claim in 2016, but China has ignored the ruling.