For long the United States has continued its belligerent military maneuvers in the South China Sea and West Pacific waters with its allies, involving war games to provoke the Chinese into retaliatory actions. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin are both in eastern Asia, siding with not only Japan and South Korea in defense, but also with the Philippines regarding the sovereignty claims in the sea, with US dollars offers this time.

But, on July 21, the Philippine and Chinese diplomats agreed at establishing a mutually acceptable arrangement at the Ren’ai Reef without conceding either side's territorial claims.

The Philippine government issued a brief statement: "Both sides continue to recognize the need to deescalate the situation in the South China Sea and manage differences through dialogue and consultation and agree that the agreement will not prejudice each other's positions in the South China Sea."

Yet the facts are straightforward. In recent history, from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the Republic of China period and to the People’s Republic of China since 1949, China has been consistent in its sovereignty claims over the South China Sea. 

When PRC, the New China, reaffirmed Chinese stance in declaring 12 nautical miles of territorial water in September 1958, its claims included the Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha Islands among others. There was no objection from the US, the United Kingdom, France, and the Philippines…until massive gas and oil reserves were found on the islands in the 1960s.

Under advice from the US, former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, Senior, in 1978 declared a new municipality of Kalayaan, in the southern end of the Philippines, stretching its territorial waters unilaterally to 200 nm to include some land territories of China. To strengthen its claim, the Philippines grounded an old US warship, the USS Harnett County, onto Ren’ai Jiao in 1999, manned it with a handful of sailors, and claimed it as Philippine territory. This is being rejected, understandably, by China. After all, the Nansha Islands and Xisha Islands are all Chinese territories and within China’s nine-dash territorial waters.

The Philippines, under current president Ferinand (Bong Bong) Marcos, Jr, is sticking to its guns that its 200 nm Exclusive Economic Zone “is legal” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This position is repeatedly backed by Washington; strangely, UNCLOS is a convention recognized but never ratified by the US, because it does not agree with a clause deemed to be “unfavorable to American economic and security interests.”

However, under Article 15 of UNCLOS, the Philippine claim of 200 nm is unlawful and should extend to only 100 nm from the Philippines’ Palawan Island at most. Article 15 entails that, lacking agreement between two States on the delimitation of their territorial seas, the boundary shall be the equidistance line unless historic title or extraordinary circumstances require a boundary at variance with equidistance. And history is on the side of China.

Therefore, according to Irish international law professor Anthony Carty, a visiting don at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Peking University, all of the islands, shoals, and reefs in China’s Xisha, Zhongsha, and Nansha Islands sea region, including Ren’ai Reef and Huangyan Dao isle, are outside the 100 nm zone provided by UNCLOS and are situated within China’s nine-dash zone, supported by Chinese historical records.

Carty has written a book titled “The History and Sovereignty of the South China Sea” on the subject and, during his research, found that in the mid-1950s, a US under-secretary of state wrote that while the Filipinos have no claim to the Nansha Islands, “it is in the US interest to encourage them to make a claim anyway to keep communist China out of the area.”

A French ambassador in Beijing wrote in 1974 “that all of this unrest in the South China Sea is due to French interference in the region and is further due to the Americans inciting the Vietnamese to make claims for embarrassing China.”

When asked by the media about external forces in the South China Sea, Carty replied: “There is absolutely no doubt that this whole dispute is entirely about the Americans trying to make life difficult for the Chinese. The aggression that is building up against China and the scapegoating of China by the whole of the so-called democratic community of the world is appalling.”

Academics, including Carty, have produced a litany of treaties and agreements dating back to the US colonization of the Philippines (1898-1946) that prove beyond doubt that the shoals belong to China. Even the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1933 rebutted any claim by the US to “seize the Spratlys” or the Nansha Islands, saying that the islands belonged to China. After Japan took control of the islands by evicting the French in 1939, it subsequently returned the islands to China after World War II under the 1943 Cairo Conference signed by the US, UK, and China as well as the 1945 Potsdam Declaration.

Now the US has five old military bases in the Philippines and four new ones, some close to Chinese territories.

According to USA Today, the US expansion of new bases is part of an American armed forces realignment along the Pacific Rim. The US’s heavy presence in the Pacific theater comprises more than 616,000 service members, US civilian employees, and dependents in 21 countries, 6 territories, 2 freely associated states, 1 protectorate, Hawaii, and Alaska.

Working with allies, the US may have promised Japan and the Philippines to use sites in their lands as quick-response bases against “possible Chinese attacks”. This is scaremongering by constant war-monger the US, as China has never attacked any country or place, and its philosophy is for peace, stabilization, and prosperity.

The author is a former chief information officer of the Hong Kong government, a PR & media consultant, and veteran journalist. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.