The latest claim emerging from Chinese academic circles—that Batanes belongs to China because it is supposedly a natural extension of Taiwan—would be laughable were it not part of a familiar pattern. It is a proposition so legally untenable that it collapses under even the most elementary principles of international law.

Yet history teaches an uncomfortable lesson: revisionist territorial claims rarely begin with soldiers. They begin with narratives.

According to Guangdong-based media reports, scholars from several Chinese institutions argued that Batanes is geographically connected to Taiwan and therefore belongs to China. Beijing has not officially endorsed this position. Nevertheless, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. correctly dismissed the assertion as “baseless,” “ludicrous,” and worthy of serious challenge, because such ideas may signal broader strategic intentions. (Reuters)

The flaw in the argument is breathtaking.

China has not even resolved Taiwan’s political status—a dispute that remains one of the most consequential issues in international politics. Yet some Chinese scholars now seek to derive a claim to Philippine territory from Beijing’s own contested position on Taiwan.

This is legal reasoning built upon an unresolved premise.

Even if one accepts, solely for the sake of argument, Beijing’s “One China” position, it does not automatically confer sovereignty over neighboring territories administered by another sovereign state. Geography is not a title. Continental shelves do not magically turn inhabited provinces into foreign possessions. Proximity is not sovereignty.

If geography alone determined ownership, then countless islands around the world would change flags overnight.

International law does not work that way.

Batanes has been administered as part of the Philippines continuously since Spanish colonial authorities formally incorporated the islands into the Philippine colony in the eighteenth century. That status continued under American administration following the Treaty of Washington of 1900, carried through Philippine independence in 1946, and remains embedded in the 1987 Constitution. The province is governed by Philippine law, represented in Congress, protected by Philippine courts, and inhabited by Filipino citizens—the Ivatan people—whose ancestral rights are recognized under Philippine law.

Every functioning test of sovereignty points in exactly one direction.

The Philippines exercises effective administration.

The Philippines enforces the law.

The Philippines protects the environment.

The Philippines conducts elections.

The Philippines recognizes ancestral domains.

The Philippines collects taxes.

The Philippines governs.

That is sovereignty—not abstract geological speculation.

The argument about continental shelves is equally misplaced. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) governs maritime entitlements such as exclusive economic zones and continental shelves. It does not determine sovereignty over land territory. International courts have consistently treated sovereignty over islands as a separate legal question from maritime delimitation.

One cannot manufacture a title to inhabited territory by pointing to underwater geology.

The distinction is fundamental.

Ironically, China itself has repeatedly insisted elsewhere that sovereignty must be established before maritime rights are discussed. To invoke continental shelf theories as a basis for claiming another country’s province is to abandon the very legal framework Beijing often invokes.

More troubling than the argument itself is the strategic pattern it appears to fit.

Observers have long noted that major territorial disputes often begin with intellectual normalization. A proposition first appears in academic conferences. It migrates into think-tank papers. It reaches state-affiliated media. Eventually, it becomes part of official diplomatic language. Whether or not that sequence unfolds here, democratic societies should recognize that ideas can become instruments of statecraft. (Reuters)

The Philippines should therefore respond with firmness—but also with confidence.

There is no legal ambiguity requiring panic.

Unlike many disputes in the South China Sea involving competing maritime claims, Batanes is not an ungoverned reef or an isolated rock whose status is uncertain. It is a fully functioning Philippine province with continuous governmental authority, constitutional recognition, and an uninterrupted chain of administration extending across centuries.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly emphasized that Philippine sovereignty and maritime rights rest upon international law, including UNCLOS and the binding 2016 South China Sea Arbitral Award, which rejected expansive Chinese maritime claims unsupported by the Convention. (Philippine News Agency)

That legal consistency matters.

It demonstrates that the Philippines’ position does not depend on historical mythology or selective cartography. It depends upon treaties, constitutional law, effective administration, and internationally recognized legal principles.

Perhaps the greatest irony lies elsewhere.

The scholars’ reasoning depends entirely upon China’s claim over Taiwan. Yet Taiwan’s political status itself remains disputed internationally. To use an unresolved sovereignty claim as the foundation for asserting sovereignty over another country’s long-settled province is not a demonstration of legal rigor.

It is an exercise in ludicrous legal imagination.

The Ivatan people are not theoretical variables in a geopolitical equation. They are Filipino citizens living on Philippine soil under Philippine sovereignty.

Maps drawn in symposium halls do not erase centuries of administration.

Geological theories do not nullify constitutions.

Political aspirations do not rewrite international law.

Batanes does not belong to China because someone declared that it sits on an imagined extension of Taiwan.

Batanes belongs to the Philippines because history, law, governance, constitutional order, and international legal principles all point to the same conclusion.

That conclusion is neither negotiable nor debatable.

It is a sovereign fact.