Outlying islands

Global Times on a recent academic gathering at which ‘experts’ said that China has sovereignty over the Batanes Islands – Philippine territory south of Taiwan.

A Taipei Times op-ed anticipates that Beijing might start to claim the islands…

The symposium offered the usual comical PRC faux history inventions. “Ju Hailong, Dean of the School of International Studies at Jinan University, noted that the [Batanes] were under the jurisdiction of Taiwan Prefecture during the Ming and Qing dynasties,” said a PRC media report…

…Many of us have worried, based on the PRC’s attempts to create a link between Taiwan’s Indigenous people and Fujian province, that eventually it would act as if all Austronesian peoples were “Chinese” in origin. Sure enough, one of the symposium “scholars” observed that the “Ivatan residents on the [Batanes] share linguistic and cultural ties with the Tao people of Lanyu [Orchid Island, off southeast Taiwan], with their cultural heritage originating from China.” Ironically, the Tao appear to have migrated up from the Philippines.

…Both the claim to the Batanes and the expanded claim to the Babuyan Islands show a key PRC behavior: claims to one territory, in this case Taiwan, lead inevitably to claims to nearby territories. Eventually the PRC will begin manufacturing claims to the Japanese islands to the east of Taiwan. This has also been the case with the PRC’s claims in the Himalayas. 

This follows similar Chinese academic discussion about Okinawa. From ASPI Strategist…

In this increasingly sophisticated narrative, the modern Japanese prefecture of Okinawa is frequently substituted with ‘Ryukyu’, the historical archipelago kingdom that included the present-day island of Okinawa. This terminology serves to decouple the islands’ identity from the Japanese state, which is cast in Chinese historical discourse as a perennial aggressor. By presenting the Ryukyus as a dual victim of Japanese militarism and US imperialism, these narratives align the Okinawan experience with China’s own century of humiliation. Ryukyu is thus depicted as a former Chinese tributary, forcibly absorbed by Japan, devastated in World War II, and later returned to Tokyo through a United States-led arrangement portrayed as illegitimate. 

The author of the latter article believes that these unofficial but high-profile hints of territorial claims are primarily a way to raise diplomatic pressure rather than lay the ground for possible future attempts at annexation.