Provocative

Can the legislature of a Philippine province— Batanes, say, or Zambales, or any other province along the West Philippine Sea—pass an ordinance requiring that all foreign fishing boats wishing to enter its portion of Philippine waters first acquire a permit from the “relevant and responsible department” of the Philippine government? Or, given that such an ordinance carries grave import—chief of which is the risk of spawning tensions with neighboring countries that make use of the same waterways—should not such a directive be left to the highest diplomatic channels or the top decision-makers of the country’s government, and not to a mere local government unit? How would the LGU enforce its directive, anyway, if not by turning to the nation’s armed forces to help it go after foreign vessels without the required permit?

That scenario has been put in place with the recent announcement by China’s Hainan province that, henceforth, foreign fishing boats are required to obtain permission from the Chinese government before they can enter any part of some two million square kilometers of water in the West Philippine Sea that Hainan says it governs. The sea is about 3.5 million kilometers in size, and part of it is claimed by the Philippines in accordance with the 200-mile exclusive economic zone doctrine specified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

But that reality has not deterred Hainan, a province in China’s southern tip that juts into the West Philippine Sea, to claim unilateral jurisdiction over the area by imposing the permit requirement, doubtless with the active encouragement of the top echelons of the Chinese government, from which many of the most aggressive moves in the territorial dispute has emanated.

This latest provocation by China, after all, comes just two months after it created a controversial air defense identification zone above the East China Sea that imposes a similar permit requirement on any aircraft passing through the airspace of some islands and the surrounding maritime area that both China and Japan claim as their own. Despite the contested ownership, China has gone ahead with its claim with an arrogance that has only heightened the hostility and suspicion prevailing in these issues.

Just yesterday, rather uncharacteristically, China sought the succor of the UN in its protest against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to a controversial war shrine. In the territorial dispute over the West Philippine Sea, China has refused UN mediation and spurned the Philippine government’s moves to resolve the matter through international arbitration. But now, it deems the UN a useful forum for airing its fury at Japan for the latter’s seeming glorification of its wartime past.

Japan’s reluctance to own up to its brutal World War II history—a history shared by the Philippines with China, Korea and other countries once under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—must not, of course, be dismissed or excused. But China must also realize that its bellicose moves in the region are only giving ammunition to conservative, right-wing elements in Japanese society to chip away at the pacifist constitution and government that Japan has adopted since the war, ostensibly in response to China’s muscle-flexing.

The Philippines, too, has been pushed to adopt a progressively more assertive stance in the face of China’s increasingly naked attempts at unilateral control over an area that, in the eyes of the international community, remains subject to rival claims by other countries such as Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. Unlike Japan, the Philippines and neighboring countries in Southeast Asia do not have the firepower to match China’s military might. All they can do at this point is to band together and continue to insist on international arbitration to settle the row and, more importantly, to bind China to enforceable rules of conduct and commerce in disputed waters.

The Philippine government has raised concerns about Hainan’s permit requirement, as it has with China’s other provocations. It must do more. Aside from the United States, it must ally with Japan and other claimant nations, to find strength in numbers and a common cause. Also, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has long dithered on the proper response to China, foregoing any united stand on the issue. More bickering and weakness from it, and its giant neighbor would only be too happy to step into the vacuum.