A Brief Genealogy of Philippine Claims in the South China Sea

In a high-stakes diplomatic cable in the early 1970s, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that “there are substantial doubts that [a Philippine] military contingent on island in the Spratly group would come within protection” of the Philippine-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT). Kissinger counseled Washington to only provide “helpful political actions” but refrain from militarily backing Manila in the event of a conflict among claimant states in the South China Sea.

The chief U.S. diplomat insisted that “[we] do not see legal basis at this time, however, for supporting the claim to Spratlys of one country over that of other claimants,” thus officially commencing half-a-century of American “strategic ambiguity” on one of the world’s most consequential maritime disputes. Emphasizing the need for “neutrality,” Kissinger was adamant that the Southeast Asian nation should not be allowed to exploit its treaty alliance with a superpower for the purposes of territorial self-aggrandizement.

Crucially, he even questioned the basis of Manila’s claims in the area, since “[Philippine] occupation could hardly be termed uncontested in face of claims and protests of Chinese and Vietnamese.” He argued that “[c]ontinuous, effective, and uncontested occupation and administration of territory” is the ultimate basis of determining ownership over disputed land features.

Nevertheless, Kissinger sought to reassure the Ferdinand Marcos regime by offering concrete military assistance, albeit with certain caveats, under certain contingencies. Specifically, he clarified that the “MDT may apply in event of attack on [Philippine] forces deployed to third countries,” although this is “fundamentally different from [a] case where deployment is for purpose of enlarging Philippine territory.” Still, the Nixon administration – and its successors well into the end of the 20th century – only generically mentioned the “Pacific” theater without specifying the South China Sea as a locus of the MDT, thus insisting on a strict position of neutrality on the status of disputed land features in the area.

Even worse, the 1951 Philippine-U.S. MDT was itself riddled with ambiguity. Crucially, Article IV of the Treaty stated, “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes [author’s own emphasis].” In contrast, Article I of the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan, signed the same year, makes it clear that “Japan grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right … to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about Japan” and that U.S. forces “may be utilized to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without [author’s own emphasis].”

In short, the Philippines’ alliance with the U.S. was inherently ambiguous, since Washington was never bound to automatic military intervention on behalf of its Southeast Asian ally in the event of a conflict with a hostile third party. This stark inequality further came to light when, four decades later, U.S. President Barack Obama, during a historic visit to Manila, repeatedly refused to clarify whether the MDT applied to Philippine disputes with China in the South China Sea just days after making it clear that Japan can rely on Washington’s full support in the event of conflict over disputed features in the East China Sea.

Just two years earlier, the Obama administration also refused to squarely stand by the Philippines amid the months-long standoff over Scarborough Shoal in 2012. This effectively mirrored the policy of the Clinton administration, which shunned any military intervention in the mid-1990s when China seized the Philippine-claimed Mischief Reef.

What’s often overlooked in the historical analysis of the South China Sea disputes is how the Philippines’ proactive efforts at consolidating its claims in the area forced Washington to double down on its strategic ambiguity.

The Kissinger intervention came in response to dogged efforts by the Marcos regime to leverage its alliance with the United States to enhance its strategic position amid an intensifying scramble for prized features in the sea. On January 23, 1973, Philippine troops occupied three key features in the Spratly Islands, most notably Thitu Island (Pag-Asa) shortly after Taiwan, then under the Kuomintang regime, harassed Philippine vessels and aircrafts hovering around Itu Aba (Taiping).

When pressed for assistance from Manila, the U.S. State Department made it clear that “the U.S. position has been and continues to be that it takes no position with respect to the conflicting claims to the islands.” At the time, both the Philippines and Taiwan were U.S. treaty allies.

A year later, then-Philippine Secretary Carlos P. Romulo again sought U.S. assurances amid fears that China would expand its operations into the Spratlys after forcefully seizing the Paracel Islands from the crumbling regime in South Vietnam. In response, U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan asked for policy clarification, in a secret cable, from superiors in Washington, D.C. as well as naval commanders at U.S. Pacific Command:

[A] Chinese military attack against the Spratlys in a manner similar to the recent attack on the Paracels could involve an armed attack against the Armed Forces of the Philippines and therefore require the United States ‘to act to meet the common dangers’. If the Department shares this interpretation of the Agreement, I would suggest that action be taken to bring these facts to the attention of the Chinese authorities in Peking [Beijing] in order to forewarn them against the prospect that military adventures in the Spratlys could engage their [sic] with the interests of the United States.

Upon learning that Washington was itself “surprised” by China’s seizure of the Paracels, Sullivan warned that “there is reasonable possibility of surprise Chinese action against [the] Spratly group with inadequate U.S. intelligence alert.” Accordingly, he reiterated his request for policy clarification as well as the need for a stern warning to Beijing lest the two powers sleepwalk into a conflict in the South China Sea.

Top American authorities, however, stubbornly continued to drag their feet on the issue – a position that was aided by Beijing’s decision to not expand the crisis beyond the Paracels at the height of the Indochina Wars.

Despite being repeatedly let down by its sole treaty ally, however, the Philippines persisted, with varying degrees of success, in preserving its territorial claims and sovereign rights in the hotly-contested body of waters. After all, the Southeast Asian nation’s claims do not merely concern – to use Obama’s unfortunate phraseology – “a bunch of rocks.”

Instead, the South China Sea issue constitutes a vital element of the Philippines’ sense of itself as a sovereign nation, not to mention the untold amount of fisheries and energy resources at stake. If anything, rising tensions with China have galvanized the Filipino nation like never before, and jolted its notoriously complacent political elite out of a strategic stupor. In many ways, the South China Sea spats have served as an impetus for the Philippines to upgrade its strategic culture, modernize its armed forces, adopt a comprehensive national security strategy as a major archipelagic nation, and gradually transform into a full-fledged “middle power” in the 21st century.

Empires of the Wind 

Beyond concrete geopolitical and geoeconomics interests, which I discussed in a June 2021 essay in The Diplomat, there are also ideational factors driving the South China Sea disputes. Beyond spats over fisheries and hydrocarbon resources, the festering maritime tussles are increasingly turning into a fundamentally existential issue for various regimes in the region.

China’s “historical” claim in the area is primarily based on ancient Chinese sailors’ supposed “discovery” of uninhabited land features – atolls, rocks, sandbars, and islets – in the Spratlys during the Han Dynasty and, a thousand years later, the supposed consolidation of Chinese claims over those features under the Ming Dynasty. Or, at the very least, that is the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party – which has relied on “Patriotic Education” and popular nationalism to bolster its legitimacy in the post-Tiananmen era – and their proto-nationalist predecessors, who sought to recapture China’s grandeur amid the ashes of the crumbling Qing Empire by constructing a maximalist cartography a century earlier.

In short, contemporary China claims ownership over much of the disputed features in the South China Sea by insisting that its “historic rights” in the area precede the advent of European imperial project in Asia and, by extension, the establishment of modern international law. In effect, China makes two major (questionable) claims through this self-serving narrative: namely that there was a coherent “Chinese” political entity before the advent of nation-states and that China was the only coherent and relevant political entity in the whole region.

But as the eminent scholar Benedict Anderson, the author of the oft cited “Imagined Communities,” has argued, “China,” as we understand it today, hardly existed in the premodern era. This is why, for instance, merchants from mainland China who traversed the South China Sea and regional seascapes primarily identified themselves by either their profession or ethno-linguistic background throughout the centuries. Not to mention, the borders of today’s China largely correspond to the Manchu-founded Qing Empire, while Beijing’s emergence as a capital city is largely due to the legacy of the Mongols, namely Kublai Khan.

But even if one were to assume the preexistence of a coherent and consolidated “Chinese” political entity – and thus to ignore the fact that China was dominated by non-Han elites throughout huge parts of the past millennium – it would be a folly to assume that it constituted the only relevant polity in the whole region. After all, the South China Sea was also, if not predominantly, explored by nearby Southeast Asian peoples, namely those from the Philippines (Badjaos), Indonesia (Orang Laut from the Riau islands), and Malaysia (Bajaus), not to mention the Cham peoples of central Vietnam.

In fact, the South China Sea was, for centuries, referred to as the “Champa Sea” thanks to the Champa Kingdom’s emergence as a major maritime power from the late 2nd century C.E. all the way to the advent of European imperialism in the 17th century. The Chams could trace their ancestry, as well as their language, to the Austronesian people in archipelagic Southeast Asia.

For thousands of years, peoples across Southeast Asia roamed the Indian Ocean and served as a nexus of transcontinental trade across the Indo-Pacific mega-region by leveraging the monsoon and thick networks of cooperation with Arab and South Asian merchant-sailors. Some of them, most notably in the case of the Majapahit Kingdom, managed to build what veteran journalist Philip Bowring described as “Empires of the Wind” across maritime Southeast Asia, otherwise known as Nusantaria.

From the perspective of the Philippines, their ancestors – known as “Mo-yi” or “Ma-I” in Chinese ports in Canton – were masters of the South China Sea and surrounding waters well before either the arrival of European empires in Asia or Chinese Admiral Zheng He’s famed expedition throughout the Indian Ocean in the 15th century. In particular, Filipinos made good use of the “karakoa,” a sophisticated and nimble warship – with an average length of 25 meters, and capable of carrying up to 100 warriors – which impressed even European observers. The Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi described the karakoa as “a ship for sailing any place [Filipinos] wanted.”

Rebirth of the Filipino Nation 

In the twilight decades of the 19th century, the Philippines led Asia’s first anti-colonial nationalist revolution, which almost toppled the Spanish regime. No wonder then, decades later, Jose Rizal, the chief architect of the Philippine revolutionary movement, would be hailed as the “father of Asian nationalism” during a gathering of Asian students in Tokyo.

The Philippines’ revolutionary momentum, however, was hijacked by a new rising empire, the United States of America, which surreptitiously purchased the Southeast Asian nation from the crumbling Spanish Empire in 1898 – to the utter horror of their Filipino revolutionary allies. This triggered the Philippine-American War, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Filipinos. Far from giving up, however, veterans of the Philippine Revolution, most notably President Manuel Quezon, continued to press Washington for national independence throughout the Commonwealth period.

In 1933, a group of senators, led by Isabelo de los Reyes, a contemporary and intellectual rival of Rizal, proposed the inclusion of nine land features (then known as “Las Corales”) near the island of Palawan as part of an eventual Philippine state. This effectively laid down the foundation for what would become Manila’s claims in the South China Sea. With an aggressively expansionist Japan increasingly posing a direct threat, Interior Secretary Elpidio Quirino, who would later become one of the first post-independence Filipino presidents, doubled down on efforts to consolidate Philippine claims in the area in coordination with Washington.

Following the Philippines’ formal declaration of independence in 1946, top Filipino officials, most notably Carlos Garcia, demanded Washington turn over the nine “Las Corales” features, now renamed as the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), to Manila as part of a security guarantee. But the status of disputed features in the South China Sea remained ambiguous even after Japan formally renounced its claims in the area during the crafting of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty.

Facing uncertain support from Washington, Filipinos took matters into their own hands. In 1948, Tomas Cloma, a navigator, claimed to have stumbled upon uninhabited land features in the South China Sea. Eight years later, he led a delegation on a 38-day expedition in the area in order to help fortify Manila’s claims. No less than Vice President Carlos P. Garcia, later president, and Senator Lorenzo Tanada, among the most influential Filipino legislators, attended Cloma’s farewell dinner in honor of the expedition. Officially, Manila maintained that while islands and land features in the South China Sea were under the de facto trusteeship of the Allied Powers, they should be open for resource extraction and development projects by littoral states.

Cloma’s resource development initiative, however, was undermined by Taiwanese military forces, which had established a robust presence on Itu Aba, the largest naturally-formed land feature in the Spratlys. Soon, the Philippines responded in kind by also expanding its military footprint in the area.

Arguably, no Filipino president made more effort to strengthen the Philippines’ position in the South China Sea than Ferdinand Marcos. In 1968, the Philippines deployed troops to the area, albeit quietly. Three years later, the Filipino strongman officially admitted that Manila had occupied several features in the area “to protect the interest of the state and its citizens,” thus fully operationalizing the Philippines' claims to the KIG. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) built its Western Command in Palawan to oversee protection of the KIG.

Over the subsequent years, the Philippines fortified its position on the ground. For example, it built among the first modern airstrips and full-fledged military facilities in the Spratlys, on Thitu Island, which would soon also host a permanent civilian population and, at times, a resident mayor. Throughout the 1970s, the Philippines also spearheaded regional efforts to coordinate and strengthen the position of smaller archipelagic nations amid the ongoing negotiations over a new maritime international regime, which culminated in the establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), signed in 1982 and effective as of 1994.

Marcos’ moves were inspired by reports of potentially large deposits of energy resources in the area as well as the commencement of offshore oil exploration activities by neighboring Southeast Asian nations. In March 1976, Philippine energy exploration activities led to the discovery of huge oil reserves near Palawan, only reinforcing Manila’s quest to solidify its position in the South China Sea.

But Marcos’ calculus was also based on high-stakes geopolitical considerations, especially as Taiwanese troops harassed Filipinos patrolling in the Spratlys and, crucially, China and (unified) Vietnam began to flex their muscle in the South China Sea, too.

Accordingly, the Philippines also stepped up its efforts to strengthen its position in Scarborough Shoal, a land feature under the de facto administrative control of Manila and also officially included in Philippine maps (e.g., Murillo Velarde Map) during the Spanish and American colonial periods. Throughout the 20th century, various Philippine regimes, first under U.S. colonial tutelage and later under fully-independent governments, exercised various degrees of jurisdiction over the shoal through law enforcement patrols, hydrographic and geodetic surveys, and military drills.

The shoal, with rich fisheries that support the livelihood of tens of thousands of families in nearby Philippine provinces on the northern island of Luzon, was not actively contested by any other claimant state up until the early 1980s. But as China and Taiwan stepped up their claims over Scarborough Shoal, the Philippines built a new light station in the area in 1991 to bolster its claims. The Philippines’ strategic vulnerability, however, was fully exposed when China seized the Manila-claimed Mischief Reef just years after the removal of American bases from nearby Subic and Clark.

Having largely relied on the U.S. security umbrella throughout the Cold War period, the Philippine military, by now also battered by decades of counterinsurgency operations against communist and Moro-Islamist rebels, was in no position to stand up to China. Perturbed by the prospect of losing more land features to a resurgent China, the Philippine Navy desperately ran a well-worn warship, the BRP Sierra Madre, aground on Second Thomas Shoal, a low-tide elevation located within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone and just about 120 nautical miles from Palawan in 1999. The grounded vessel has hosted a small outpost of Philippine troops ever since.

Throughout the 2000s, the Philippines sought to freeze the conflict by exploring, among others, warmer ties with China, culminating in the controversial Joint Maritime Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) pact among Manila, Beijing, and Hanoi. But those conciliatory efforts ultimately backfired when massive corruption scandals hounded China’s investment deals under the deeply unpopular Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001-2010) administration.

The tense situation in the South China Sea reached a denouement in 2012, when China, following a months-long naval standoff with the Philippines, seized Scarborough Shoal. In response, the Benigno Aquino III administration doubled down on the country’s military modernization program, fortified defense ties with Washington under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), and, crucially, made the unprecedented decision to take China to international court over the maritime disputes.

The election of pro-Beijing Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 radically altered the Philippines’ South China Sea policy. Nevertheless, his efforts to find a compromise with Beijing failed to alter the dynamic in the South China Sea, with China further militarizing artificially built islands across disputed waters and offering little investment to Manila. And it exposed the paucity of a conciliatory approach toward the Asian superpower. If anything, Duterte’s failed China diplomacy only reinforced anti-Beijing sentiments among the Philippine defense establishment and the broader Filipino public, who overwhelmingly advocated for a tougher stance in the South China Sea in tandem with traditional allies.

Against this backdrop, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s foreign policy shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. After initially exploring a “new golden era” of bilateral relations with China, the namesake son of the former Philippine strongman doubled down on his defense alliance with a whole network of partners and allies as soon as it became clear to him that Beijing was in no mood to make any concrete concessions in the South China Sea.

Accordingly, Marcos Jr., taking a page from his father’s playbook, has sought to leverage the Philippines’ alliance with the U.S. in order to strengthen Manila’s position in the South China Sea. With the Southeast Asian nation emerging as among the fastest growing economies in the world, it’s also in a better position to bolster its own capabilities without overreliance on any particular external partner.

Aside from greenlighting a $36 billion military modernization program, his administration is also implementing the Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept (CADC), which is set to enhance the Southeast Asian nation’s capacity to protect its maritime borders across all vital theaters, namely the South China Sea, Bashi Channel and the Philippine Sea.

Ultimately, the Philippines’ ongoing struggle in the South China Sea has galvanized the country’s strategic elite and broader masses like never before. Far from acting as America’s pawn, the Philippines seeks to become the captain of its own strategic destiny by proactively resisting the world’s new superpower.