Territories beyond maps

THE SOUTH China Sea, or "Philippine Sea" (the nomenclature insisted upon, and registered by the Republic of the Philippines) is around 3,500,000 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean from the Singapore and Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan. The area’s importance largely results from one-third of the world’s shipping transiting through its waters, and is believed to hold huge oil and gas reserves beneath its seabed, according to an Associated Press report.

Its first written name was Nanfang Hai, or simply Southern Sea, as chronicled in the Western Zhou Dynasty Yizhoushu (1046-771 BCE). There it was written that "barbarians from that sea gave tributes to the Zhou rulers, of hawksbill sea turtles," even then rare, and precious for their three-meter nacre carapace or back cover, which was carved for jewelry and inlaid tortoise-shell furniture. Those "barbarians" in the Zhou Dynasty were native pirates from the surrounding aggrupation of yet-unnamed and unclaimed islands beyond China.

Geologists say the South (China) Sea opened around 45 million years ago, when, by Teutonic explosion, a huge chunk of the continent broke away from mainland Asia at the tip of southern China. In those long millennia, the opened South (China) Sea has been the repository of large sediment volumes delivered by the Yuan (Red) River of Vietnam, the Pearl River of the Guandong delta in China, and the Mekong River, which runs through China, Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. In modern times, oil and mineral deposits were confirmed to be in almost all of the islands sprung from that Teutonic explosion millennia ago: Borneo and the Indonesian archipelago, the Philippine archipelago, the Paracel islands, and the small, now politically contested islands, the Spratlys, Sabah, even little Scarborough Shoal.

But perhaps the historicity of the politically contested islands bobbing in the China Sea goes back to the massive colonization drive of Europe in the 15th to 17th centuries. When in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the paradigm-setting papal bull, Inter caetera, he divided the conquerable lands east and west of Africa between feuding Catholic colonizers Spain and Portugal, respectively, and set them to claim unnamed islands as "territory." But when Spain and Portugal were passing each other toward the east or west, on the other side of the globe, one small detail -- that the world was round -- still perpetuated the "first to discover" basis of colonization. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) further clarified the demarcation line near the Spice Islands for half of the world for Spain, and half for Portugal.

Christopher Columbus, Italian navigator, had proposed to the King of Spain in 1492 to look for the "Spice Islands" (modern Maluku Islands in Indonesia), and to grab a Spanish monopoly for supply of spices in Europe. But instead of reaching Japan towards India as he had intended, Columbus landed in the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador. Despite never having reached the targeted East Indies, Columbus started the first lasting contact of Europe with the Americas, and the colonization of the Americas for Spain.

And so Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner, proposed to Charles I of Spain to sail westward to still search for the Spice Islands. He was the first to sail from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific Ocean (the "peaceful sea") and his fleet was the first to circumnavigate the Earth (although Magellan himself did not complete the entire voyage, as he was killed by the native Filipino warrior Lapu-Lapu in Mactan, in the Philippines in 1521). Again, Magellan thought he had reached the Spice Islands.

In the frenzy of 15th- to 16th-century colonization, territory was of course the obsession. In 1635 a British jurist, John Selden broached the idea that "the sea was in practice as capable of appropriation as terrestrial territory." Conflicting claims needed clarification up to where ownership extended seawards from land. This was determined as three nautical miles (five kilometers), the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect the territory from the sea. Twelve nautical miles (22 km) from a coastline was eventually established as the international norm by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

In 1898, the Philippines Islands was ceded by Spain to the United States in the Treaty of Paris settlement after the Spanish American War. In the 50 years as an American colony, the Philippines was focused on catching up with development and progress in the new world of democracy, which status as an independent nation was promised as a reward for fighting for the US in the World Wars. With true independence awarded in 1944, the fledgling nation was thereafter engrossed in establishing the bureaucracies of self-governance, in the stressful environment of reconstruction after the Wars. It was only in 1971, in the first regular term of Ferdinand Marcos as president, that the Philippines announced its claim to islands adjacent to its territory in the Spratlys, which was named Kalayaan, formally incorporated into Palawan province in 1972.

The total four-square mile Spratly Islands are a disputed group of more than 750 reefs, islets, atolls, cays, and islands in the South China Sea claimed and occupied by relatively small numbers of military forces from the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan (RoC), Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, mostly on the basis of contingency of coastline within the UNCLOS three-mile radius. The islands offer rich fishing grounds and may contain significant oil and natural gas reserves. But there’s big trouble for the Spratly claimants, as the awakened economic giant, the erstwhile anti-capitalist People’s Republic of China (PRC) has unilaterally announced a 200-mile radius outwards to the seas from its shores, as its exclusive economic zone. This goes around the various archipelagos in the South China Sea, depriving both full nations and uninhabited islands alike of their own territorial waters. That is 80% of the whole South (China) Sea, claimed by Communist China, known iconoclast to history, to be their "historical" heritage.

Strange how history seems to go back to the maritime battles of Spain and Portugal for the world, as the backdrop shows the cannons aimed at intruders to national shores, and props are the hapless little islands needed to be colonized to firm boundaries and extend power. For it is the South (China) Sea again that is the prized consolidation of greedy monopoly, like this same body of water was the coveted gateway by both Spain and Portugal for those spices from the Indies. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) based on a US Geological Survey estimate, the South (China) Sea region’s discovered and undiscovered oil reserves are at 28 billion barrels, (PRC figures profess 213 billion barrels). The same EIA report estimates a wide variety of natural gas resources, ranging from 900 trillion cubic feet (25.5 trillion cubic meters) to two quadrillion cubic feet (56.6 trillion cubic meters).

But the People’s Republic of China also has territorial claims on Burma, Laos, Northern India, Vietnam, Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Ryukyu Islands, 300 islands of the South China, East China and Yellow Seas, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Taiwan, South Kazakhstan, the Afghan province of Bahdashan, Transbaikalia and the far east to South Okhotsk, to recover territory lost in the fall of the Qing Dynasty. "We must conquer the globe where we will create a powerful state," former Chairman Mao Zedong had said. Territories beyond maps.

With China’s headstrong thrust to conquer and rule the world, the once dependable "Big Brother" America is pathetically helpless to help the smaller nations. Perhaps the US is economically, now politically subservient to the ruthless Emperor of the world, refreshed from a nap in communism and now in full Imperialist determination to reign forever as Heaven’s Son.


source:  Businessworld's Corporate Watch Column by Amelia HC Ylagan