Coveting Batanes
It isn’t that no one can take the fiction. Instead, everyone agreed the intellectually dishonest claim is, as Albert Camus would say, the ‘fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth’.
Daily TribuneIt isn’t that no one can take the fiction. Instead, everyone agreed the intellectually dishonest claim is, as Albert Camus would say, the ‘fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth’.
Historically, culturally and politically, their sovereignty claim over the Batanes Islands is pathetically ludicrous and fantastical.
Still, no matter how brazen is the claim of a dozen or so Chinese scholars, distrustful seasoned China observers and security officials quickly knew their fictional territorial narrative, dressed up as scholarship, bore appalling sinister motives.
It isn’t that no one can take the fiction. Instead, everyone agreed the intellectually dishonest claim is, as Albert Camus would say, the “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
And, the truth to be quickly told is that the seemingly innocuous scholarly tête-à-tête about Batanes perfectly aligns with, even preludes, hegemonic China’s strategic ambition to expand its geopolitical influence.
Specifically, the truth is also that the Batanes Islands chain, together with the strategic Bashi Channel, is for China a critical chokepoint for her long-coveted military ambition to break out of its present strategic encirclement in the South China Sea and into the Pacific Ocean and beyond.
Besides Bashi Channel, Miyako Strait, which runs between the Japanese islands of Miyako and Okinawa, is the other chokepoint of China’s ambition. Both waterways constitute entryways to the Pacific for China’s navy.
At any rate, Batanes’ northernmost Mavulis Island overlooks Luzon Strait’s Bashi Channel, the highly strategic 150-km wide deep waterway that separates the Philippines and Taiwan.
Mavulis island is seemingly an insignificant speck. But security strategists have concluded it may be the linchpin, even a key terrain, should there be superpower hostilities over Taiwan.
In 2023, the Philippine Navy put up a detachment on Mavulis and atop its hill stands the country’s northernmost flagpole.
Both Mavulis and the Batanes Islands also figure in recent significant reports other than the Chinese self-serving argument that the island chain is a “natural geographic extension” of Taiwan and therefore belongs to China.
Beginning last month, the China Coast Guard started a flurry of intrusive “sovereignty” patrols off Taiwan’s east coast, very near the Luzon Strait. China said the patrols were its response to the Japan-Philippine announcement of formal maritime border delimitation talks.
In fact, the Chinese scholars denounced the Japan-Philippine border talks, calling it illegal and an infringement of China’s sovereignty, prompting one analyst to say the denunciation was a pretext to backing up patrols in the Philippine Sea and for China’s creeping expansionism. The scholars’ reference to the border talks, in fact, mirrored the Chinese foreign ministry’s assertions.
“China saw an opportunity. China used that pretext to do something that they wanted to do anyway, which was to begin running these patrols east of Taiwan and into the Philippine Sea. The scholars were afterward gathered to supply a legal veneer. And for Beijing, a veneer is enough when backed by military and paramilitary force,” said China observer Ray Powell.
In any case, China escalating its territorial claim over Batanes using legal arguments and academic discourse points to the broader regional security concern that it is perhaps seeking unrestricted access for its navy and nuclear submarines to the Indo-Pacific region through the Bashi Channel.
Security concerns were accentuated the other week when a Chinese nuclear submarine conducted on short notice a ballistic missile test launch in the Pacific Ocean, prompting fears China is embarking on a new era of massive nuclear submarine expansion in the open seas.
Security experts point out that Bashi Channel’s considerable depth provides undetectable passage to and from the South China Sea not only for US nuclear submarines but also for China’s growing nuclear submarine force.