The tendency of the Communist Party government in China, as elsewhere, to rewrite history to reflect changes in personnel or ideology is well known. Less noticed, however, is the tendency to rewrite national history to justify expansionist foreign policies. The recent stand-off between Chinese and Philippine ships is a case in point.
The confrontation resulted from Philippine attempts to arrest Chinese vessels fishing in the area of what is known in English as the Scarborough Shoal, to China as Huangyan Island, and to the Philippines as Panatag Shoal. This is a collection of rocks, reefs and lagoons in the South China Sea about 200 kilometres west of Subic Bay, the former US naval base. It is approximately three times that distance to the mainland of China and more than twice that to Taiwan. Thus, it lies clearly within the Philippines's exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres). Chinese vessels would have a right to fish in its waters if the shoal could be shown to be genuinely Chinese.
China's case as expounded by the Foreign Ministry is one where the only history that matters is Han Chinese. Its claim reads: 'It is China who first discovered Huangyan Island' and 'drew into China's map in China's Yuan dynasty (1271-1368AD)'. This is like Europeans claiming that they got to Australia before the Aboriginals or the Americas before Native Americans.
As China in particular should be well aware, 700 years is not very long. Chinese were actually latecomers to navigation beyond coastal waters. For centuries, the masters of the oceans were the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who colonised much of the world, from Taiwan to New Zealand and Hawaii to the south and east, and to Madagascar in the west. Bronze vessels were being traded with Palawan, just south of Scarborough, at the time of Confucius.
When Chinese Buddhist pilgrims like Faxian went to Sri Lanka in the 5th century, they went in ships owned and operated by Malay peoples. Ships from what is now the Philippines traded with Funan, a state in what is now southern Vietnam, 1,000 years before the Yuan dynasty. China makes much of the early 15th century expeditions of Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Africa. But Indonesians had been crossing that ocean at least 1,000 years earlier, settling in Madagascar, the fourth-largest island in the world. Their twin-outrigger ships enabled quite swift passage across the ocean, and the Indonesians also left their mark on the coast of Africa before being supplanted by Indian and then Arab traders.
It is absurd to imply that the ancestors of today's Filipinos were unaware of the Scarborough Shoal, which lay relatively close to their shores and on the route to Vietnam. No one settled there because the rocks are, for practical purposes, uninhabitable. The fact that it was put on a map in 1279 does not make it Chinese any more than Taiwan was Chinese until occupation by and settlement from the mainland some 300 years ago. For the preceding 4,000 years, Taiwan had been the domain of Malay peoples related to today's Filipinos.