The conference in late June of “scholars” of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that announced out of the blue that the Batanes Islands of the Philippines were “Chinese,” based on the PRC claim to Taiwan, was not a one-off event. It was an outstanding instance of a pattern in the production of PRC territorial claims: the announcement by a scholar or scholars that a place, hitherto never identified as Chinese, had a completely different identity that somehow implied it was part of China.
A few of these private expansionist projects I have touched on in other columns. The “maps of national humiliation,” expansionist fantasies in cartographic form that purported to show territories “lost” to China, were first mooted by cartographer Bai Mei-chu (白眉初, “Notes from Central Taiwan: Imaginings of another Taiwan,” May 8, 2023). Others picked them up, eventually leading to their adoption in national policymaking.
“Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times” runs the PRC cant. The claim that “The royal court of the Sui Dynasty had on three occasions sent troops to Taiwan, called Liuqiu (流求) at that time,” has become a staple of that propaganda package. There is no question that “Liuqiu” was a reference to the Ryukyu islands, as Lin Man-houng (林滿紅) and Huang Yi-chen definitively showed in their 2024 paper “Yizhou and Liuqiu...
Beijing’s assertions over Taiwan and neighboring lands rely on selective readings, modern reinterpretations and claims that historians can readily disprove The conference in late June of “scholars”...