On July 12, the Philippines will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the arbitral award issued by an international tribunal facilitated by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. The arbitral ruling generally favored the position of the Philippines vis-a-vis its claim against China in the West Philippine Sea.  

Looking back, this stemmed from China’s narrative that it has historical sovereignty and “indisputable” rights over islands and their adjacent waters covered by its “nine-dash-line” territorial and maritime claims — that subjectively appropriated “85% to 90% of the entire South China Sea.”  

The Philippines offered three arguments: “China’s nine-dash line is invalid for it has no legal basis under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), that none of the Spratlys were legally islands capable of generating an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and that China had violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights and damaged the environment.”

Conversely, the tribunal anchored its decision of invalidating China’s claims on the following key legal principles: upon the signing of UNCLOS by participating countries — which both the Philippines and China did — they agreed that the treaty would supersede any prior claims, and that any prior historic claims to resources within an EEZ were legally extinguished if they were incompatible with the UNCLOS framework.

Notably, China’s assertion of sovereign rights violates UNCLOS and international law for under UNCLOS, coastal states are granted a 200-nautical-mile EEZ and continental shelf, so that the nine-dash line arbitrarily overlaps with the recognized EEZs of neighboring countries like the Philippines.

China’s claims were, moreover, tied to its occupation of maritime features in the Spratlys, which the tribunal ruled to be but submerged reefs, rocks, and low-tide elevations. These maritime features do not produce extended EEZ or continental shelf rights based on the provisions of the UNCLOS. Thus, China’s sweeping claims to the surrounding waters are legally groundless.

There was no evidence also that China had historically exercised exclusive control over these waters nor has it restricted other states from exploiting their resources. Instead, it was noted that while Chinese navigators and fishermen historically used the islands in the South China Sea, sailors from many other nations did the same. Therefore, it failed the legal threshold required to establish historic sovereign rights to the waters claimed.

Furthermore, China’s aggressive construction of artificial islands — like the building of military structures at the Kagitingan Reef (Fiery Cross Reef) — cannot change the legal status of a “rock” like reefs into a legal “island” capable of creating maritime sovereign rights or jurisdiction.

Sore loser

As expected, China did not accept the arbitral ruling. To resist it, it resorted to employing a multifaceted, highly coordinated strategy. Military officials and experts call it “Salami Slicing” tactic — the method of “taking small, incremental, non-military steps over time to gradually absorb territory while avoiding triggering a full-scale kinetic war.”  

Part of its actions involved resorting to the so-called “gray-zone” tactics. These are measures that are intentionally aggressive but fall just below the threshold of open military conflict. For instance, China has been deploying vast fleets of heavily reinforced commercial fishing vessels, known as the Chinese Maritime Militia (CMM), to overwhelm specific geographic features and physically push out Philippine patrols. 

China Coast Guard (CCG), in parallel, has been using highly aggressive maneuvers to disable Philippine vessels without causing lethal casualties. This includes intentional ramming, firing military-grade lasers to blind crew members, and blasting high-pressure water cannons to deliberately shatter navigation and communication electronics. 

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In particular, China has increasingly used scientific explorations as a legal and physical cover to assert permanent presence. It deployed state-owned research vessels to regularly map highly sensitive areas of the Philippine seabed within the EEZ without permission. This included the recent deployments of movable floating platform and communication antennae inside Bajo de Masinloc, which is viewed by maritime experts as “pre-reclamation pretexts” — for laying the groundwork for another permanent artificial island or military base. (READ: [OPINION] Why a Chinese structure in Bajo de Masinloc is a sovereign red line)

In hindsight, the use of temporary innocuous science setups is historically observed to have been used as a sly way to establish permanent presence. 

China is likewise using unilateral legal declarations to rewrite international maritime boundaries. It has been consistently rejecting the legally binding 2016 Arbitral Tribunal ruling while continuing to draw expansive lines over the entire South China Sea. 

By formally declaring that international treaties — such as the High Seas Treaty — do not apply to any waters within its self-declared nine-dash line (sometimes called “10-dash”) line, China has essentially claimed unilateral administrative jurisdiction over no less than 85% of the South China Sea that international law defines as global commons.

To shape global and local perceptions, China is also deploying coordinated disinformation operations that inverts or distorts facts. Immediately following an incident like the ramming of the Philippines’ Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) by a Chinese vessel, Chinese state media releases pre-packaged narratives and edited videos. They falsely claim that Philippine ships were the aggressors invading Chinese territory. 

The CCG has also been routinely dropping long chains of floating nets and barriers secured by anchors across the narrow entrances in Bajo de Masinloc. These block both the Philippine Coast Guard and local artisanal fishermen from accessing its calm lagoon waters. 

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Not content with its harassing tactics, China has been focusing massive assets on blockading Ayungin Shoal in the attempt to starve out the small contingent of Philippine Marines stationed aboard the grounded BRP Sierra Madre by blocking essential food, fresh water, and repair materials. 

Chinese fighter jets and helicopters were as well utilized. They were deployed to shadow, buzz, and deter aerial monitoring or photography of their operations near the shoal.

China has also heavily tolerated Chinese fishermen to systematically plunder the reefs. No less than the CCG and Chinese maritime militia escorted them, enabling the harvest of “thousands of endangered giant clams, sea turtles, pufferfish, and stingrays.” The extraction of giant clams required Chinese vessels to use destructive boat propellers to chew up and chop entire living coral reef structures into dead debris.  

China’s massive dredging operations to build artificial military bases in the Spratlys “have buried more than 1,861 hectares (4,600 acres) of living coral reefs under sand and concrete, causing permanent damage to regional fish spawning grounds.”

Equally important is the maneuver of China to legally annex Philippine features by declaring Bajo de Masinloc as a “national nature reserve” (naming it unilaterally as the Huangyan Dao National Nature Reserve). It’s a coercive ploy to permanently seize the area and mask its territorial ambitions. 

China’s ultimate playbook unravelled

The talk of the two resource persons invited by The Monday Circle last June 29 in connection with the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the arbitral award proved providential in unravelling China’s ultimate playbook in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).  

Sharing their experience and observation on China’s game plan was Professor Joshua Espena and Regine Cabato. Professor Joshua is a tenured lecturer in International Relations and Strategic Studies at PUP, PhD Political Science scholar at UP Diliman, and Young Leader of the Pacific Forum, recognized as one of the country’s rising strategic thinkers in maritime security, naval diplomacy. Ms. Cabato is a freelance journalist primarily based in the Philippines with a postgraduate degree in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London under a Chevening scholarship in 2025. 

The talks delivered by Professor Espena and Ms. Cabato culminated into the thesis whereby the Philippines has to take action “to prepare for war” before it’s too late.  

But as unravelled in the ensuing discussion, the reason behind this thesis is far beneath the obvious possibility of becoming an inevitable collateral target due to American presence in the archipelago, aggravated by the expressed stand of the US in the conflict between Taiwan and China but by something more unlikely that is similar to the war in the Pacific in World War II. This is no less than China’s unspoken commercial goals in the WPS. 

Cesar Tolentino, a member of The Monday Circle and consultant in the semiconductor industry, said China is conducting deep-sea mining operations in the South China Sea for rare earth elements (REEs). Examples of REEs are Scandium, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, among others, are very important in today’s technologies. As he shared, these heavy metals are critical components in the production of crystals for use in lasers that are used in semiconductor manufacturing. They are also used as tracing compounds for use in medical procedures such as MRI (magnetic-resonance imaging), aside from being used as doping compounds for metal alloys and related materials used in semiconductor manufacturing, automotives, aeronautics, medical equipment, solar panels, manufacturing equipment, space vehicles, power plants.  

In addition, they serve as chemical agents for water treatment, detoxification of waste, and those used in disaster mitigation, aside from being additives to magnets used in medical equipment such as in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

China retains a dominant global monopoly on REEs, controlling approximately 60% of global mine production and over 90% of refining and magnet manufacturing.  

China is all consumed in maintaining its dominance in the supply of REEs. This dominance allows China to set industry terms, utilizing strict export restrictions on minerals and technology to protect its strategic geopolitical leverage. This is why it is currently investing in exploring sources of REEs outside of its borders, which include explorations and experimentations in territories including the South China Sea, particularly in the Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) and Ayungin Shoal (Second Thomas Shoal) area.  

The prospects in the deep-sea basins surrounding or within these shoals are accordingly considered very high because these deep-sea formations are known to absorb high concentrations of critical tech metals over millions of years, including rare earths like yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, and neodymium. 

Clearly, the ongoing geopolitical standoff between the Philippines and China is not just about the presence of US forces in our shores and the impending invasion of Taiwan. It is but tightly intertwined with China’s overriding ambition to maintain its world dominance in the supply and control in the production of goods from REEs, which China is trying to materialize in these parts of the WPS — a mindset which also validates the thesis that the Philippines should act to prepare for war before it’s too late. – Rappler.com

(You may reach the writer at densomera@yahoo.com)