MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 01 March) – The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has “strongly” condemned and refuted recent Chinese claims over Palawan Island as posted on Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms.
In a statement Friday, the NHCP said the post “falsely states that the island of Palawan was once theirs and they have governed it for one thousand years, but the Philippines claims jurisdiction and has named it Palawan.”
The post originated from Rednote, an app similar to Tiktok, and adds that the island should be returned to China. The false claim refers to Palawan as “Zheng He Island” after the famous Chinese explorer who traveled the seas of Asia from the 1300s to the 1400s.
The NHCP said exploration “does not equate to sovereign ownership” and that “there is no evidence to support the settlement of a permanent Chinese population in Palawan which has been continuously populated since 50,000 years ago through archeological data.”
The Commission added that no accounts of Chinese settlement were seen in available documents, including those of Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta who joined Magellan’s expedition, the first ever circumnavigation of the world.
“Palawan was populated by communities of similar cultural affinity with the rest of the archipelago,” the statement said.
According to the Bangsamoro Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, “While the formerly Muslim majority population in Mindanao was reduced to 40% as a result of the influx of Christian Filipino settlers in the 20th century, as of 2015 Muslims were reported by the Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Democratization as forming an ‘overwhelming majority’ in Palawan, as well as the Sulu Archipelago. However, other sources had earlier reported a 50-50 split between Muslims and Christians—with Muslims concentrated mostly in the south of Palawan.”
The early Muslim inhabitants in mainland Palawan were the Panimusan, who became Muslims as a result of close contact with the Sulu Sultanate. Muslims are mostly found in the southern part of Palawan such as Batarasa, Rizal, Quezon, Brooke’s Point and Espanola. Isolated Muslim communities are also found in Narra, Roxas, Taytay and Aborlan.
The NHCP cited that historical maps from various European cartographers from the 1500s to the 1800s recognized the inclusion of Palawan in the Philippine archipelago as administered by the Sultan of Sulu and the Spanish Captain-Generalcy of the Philippines. The 1898 Treaty of Paris, amended by the 1900 Treaty of Washington, clearly defined the areas that would become the present-day Philippines, it added.
The NHCP said that while this fact have been accepted by the international community for over a century and no other state contests it, “the Chinese state has flip-flopped on its claims that culminated in the infamous Nine-Dash Line which was soundly declared illegal by the Permanent Court of Arbitration through the 2016 arbitral ruling.”
China has changed its Nine-Dash Line claim to a Ten-Dash Line position.
“The NHCP stands by the policy of the rest of the Philippine Government that not one inch of Filipino sovereign territory is for sale, nor can any be claimed by states that purport to be our friends yet continue to undermine regional stability through the reprehensible use of questionable historical data. Palawan is and will always be Filipino,” the statement concluded. (H. Marcos C. Mordeno/MindaNews)
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