The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on Monday, March 3, dismissed as a propaganda the claims circulating on social media that the province of Palawan was once part of China.
Col. Francel Margareth Padilla, AFP spokesperson, said the Chinese claim no longer surprised the military no matter how absurd it was.
“It's very well known that they really come out with a lot of propaganda materials,” Padilla said in a television interview over ANC, dismissing the Chinese claim.
The controversy stemmed from posts on Chinese social media platforms Weibo (similar to microblogging site X or formerly Twitter) and Rednote (similar to video sharing platform TikTok) among others last week where some users claimed Palawan once belonged to China and the Chinese government had governed it for 1,000 years.
Based on the Chinese claims, Palawan was included in the so-called "dash-line" claims of China in the South China Sea and was called as the “Zheng He Island”, after the famous Chinese explorer and seafarer who travelled the seas and oceans of Asia from the 1300s to the 1400s.
Some netizens demanded that the Philippines should "return" Palawan to China.
The island province of Palawan lies on the southwest portion of the Philippines and is “pointing as if it were a dagger towards the northeastern corner of Borneo”, according to the official website of the local government of Palawan.
It said Spanish colonizers called the islands “Paragua” and installed the seat of administration at Cuyo island but later transferred it to Puerto Princesa City, the present capital of the province, until the Americans changed the province’s name to Palawan.
The Philippines and China have overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea, including in some features located in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) near Palawan.
In 1999, the AFP deliberately ran aground a Philippine Navy ship, BRP Sierra Madre, on Ayungin (Second Thomas) Shoal in the Spratly Islands, about 105 nautical miles west of Palawan, to assert its claims on the submerged reef.
But it was the first time that the entire province of Palawan had been included in the Chinese claims.
“With us, we know that for a fact, international laws are behind the Philippines,” Padilla said.
“The arbitral ruling of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has favored the Philippines, taking therein our exclusive economic zone. We stand by that, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines will continue to uphold this and guard our sovereignty and our sovereign rights as well,” she added.
To counter false Chinese narratives, Padilla said netizens should be more circumspect in everything that they see on social media, stressing that not all of them are true.
She said that by being critical, the public could help stop the spread of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation.
“Help us to put the right narrative out there with the international ruling favoring the Philippines so there is a very great online presence of the Filipinos and we can leverage on that to help each other out and spread the right narrative out there and for the whole world to know,” she said.
The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) earlier debunked the Chinese claims on Palawan, saying that 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 archeological data.
It said that 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.
It noted that Palawan was populated by communities of similar cultural affinity with the rest of the Philippine archipelago.
"In years since then, historical maps from various European cartographers from the 1500s to the 1800s recognized the inclusion of Palawan Island in the Philippine archipelago as administered by the Sultanate of Sulu and the Spanish Captain-Generalcy of the Philippines. Later, the 1898 Treaty of Paris, amended by the 1900 Treaty of Washington, clearly defined the areas that would become our republic’s territory in the present day," the NHCP explained.