LOST among the headlines this week, and not given much attention as readers appeared engrossed in other issues like inflation, poverty and political theater, is the senseless claim by China over Palawan, the country’s 10th most populous island.
We add our voice to the punctilious condemnation by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, the agency mandated with promoting our country’s history and preserving our rich cultural heritage, of China’s blatantly ridiculous claim over Palawan.
This farcical claim circulated in Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms, deceptively stating Palawan was once their, governed it for one thousand years, but the Philippines claims jurisdiction and has named it Palawan.
The post originated from the Rednote app, one similar to Tiktok, adding the island should be returned to China, suggesting Palawan was called “Zheng He Island” after the Chinese explorer and seafarer who it claimed traveled the seas and oceans of Asia from the 1300s to the 1400s.
Zheng He (romanized Cheng Ho; 1371–1433/1435) was a Chinese admiral, explorer, diplomat, and bureaucrat during the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Straight away China’s leadership, not helped any by their synthetic historians, should make this claim now, some 50 years after President Marcos flew to Beijing to meet up with then China’s leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping following the establishment of diplomatic relations.
There exists no evidence to support the settlement of a permanent Chinese population in Palawan which has been continuously populated since 50,000 years ago through archaeological data.
From a historical perspective, no accounts of Chinese settlement were seen in available documents, as early as 1521, through the accounts of Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta who was part of the first circumnavigation of the world.
Palawan was populated by communities of similar cultural affinity with the rest of the Philippine archipelago.
The head of the expedition had, in fact, made a blood compact with the chief of the community that the NHCP recognized to be in the present day Sitio Tagusao, Brooke’s Point, Palawan. But this does not preclude the existence of trade relations as our ancestors had, as we are at present, been trading with our neighbors for millennia, the NHCP said.
We underline NHCP’s argument that vassalage by a predecessor nation does not equate to sovereign rule in the present day. Early Filipino polities in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao were, at one point or another, closely connected to sultanates and rajahnates in other parts of Southeast Asia.
Like the NHCP, we stand 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 pretend to be friends and yet continue to undermine regional stability through the disgraceful use of questionable historical data.
What will they think of next?