On September 3, China’s state-run Global Times published an opinion piece disputing Philippine sovereignty over Batanes. I see this as another attempt to nibble at the Philippine archipelago, one piece at a time. The claim is absurd, dangerous, and deserving of a firm national response.
The latest argument says that Batanes is legally part of Taiwan and therefore belongs to China. That logic already limps before it reaches the Bashi Channel: Beijing does not govern Taiwan, yet a writer in its state media uses Taiwan as a bridge for claiming Philippine territory. If mere geographic closeness determined ownership, maps would become menus, and powerful countries could help themselves to whichever neighboring island pleased their appetite.
Batanes is not an unnamed rock waiting to be discovered. Spain formally incorporated the islands into the Philippines in 1783; the province has remained under Philippine administration for more than two centuries; and the Ivatans are Filipino citizens who elect Philippine officials and live under Philippine law. I find it insulting that their identity and homeland can be treated as movable labels by writers armed with a ruler, an old map, and an obedient imagination.
China’s sweeping claims in the South China Sea were rejected by the 2016 arbitral tribunal insofar as they asserted historic rights beyond what the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea permits. Yet the pressure has not disappeared. It has taken different forms—coast guard patrols, maritime militia, intimidating maneuvers, official maps, academic forums, and now arguments that try to pull Batanes away from the Philippines through Taiwan.
This is how territorial ambition often moves: not always with the thunder of guns, but with the scratching of pens. A claim is aired by scholars, repeated by a state-run newspaper, circulated often enough to sound familiar, and eventually presented as an issue with “two sides.” I dislike that method because it turns repetition into a crowbar. Falsehood does not become history simply because it has been printed many times.
At this rate, why stop at Batanes? China might as well claim the entire Pacific Ring of Fire because its volcanoes and trenches are geologically connected. It could perhaps claim every island visited by the same migratory birds or washed by the same ocean current. The humor is deliberate, but the point is serious: physical connection, ancestral contact, or geographic proximity does not automatically transfer sovereignty from one state to another.
I also refuse to let the Ivatan people be reduced to exhibits in somebody else’s territorial argument. Their cultural ties with communities across the sea reveal centuries of migration and human contact, not Chinese ownership of their homeland. Families can have relatives across borders without surrendering their citizenship; cultures can share roots without sharing a government. To twist kinship into a title deed is to misuse anthropology and disregard the living choice and political identity of the people concerned.
The Philippines should answer this campaign with steady facts, visible governance, stronger defense, and close attention to Batanes and its people. Every false claim should meet a clear diplomatic rejection, every distorted history should meet credible scholarship, and every attempt to create uncertainty should meet a nation speaking with one voice. Batanes does not need noisy chest-thumping; it needs a country calm enough to know what is hers and determined enough never to let anyone erase it from the map.
