The pre-colonial Ivatan society, defined by its fortified idjangs (mountain fortresses) and autonomous participation in the Maritime Jade Road, was a sovereign entity. To subsume their heritage under a Chinese claim based on ancient trade networks or proximity is an epistemic assault.

A recent ideological provocation by state-aligned academics at Jinan University has laid bare the rapacious nature of contemporary regional hegemony. By asserting that the northernmost Philippine province of Batanes is a “natural geographical extension of Taiwan”—and therefore subject to Chinese sovereign custody based on Ming and Qing dynasty maritime registries—these scholars have committed an act of cartographic violence. While Beijing has not yet formalized this into official state policy, this academic maneuver functions as a classic trial balloon designed to build a long-term legal veneer for expansionism.

Yet, as the national democratic movement has historically demonstrated, the response to such overreach cannot simply be a carbon copy of the state’s militarist talking points. To confront this issue through a genuinely decolonial and anti-imperialist lens, we must dismantle two distinct but dialectically linked illusions: the historical revisionism of an ascendant regional superpower, and the neo-colonial subservience of the Philippine state elite, who are currently weaponizing the country’s geography to serve Washington’s global war machine.

Academic lawfare and epistemic violence

The attempt to reduce Batanes to an appendage of Taiwan relies on a profoundly colonial worldview. It mimics the same Eurocentric logic that drew arbitrary lines across the Global South during the 1884 Berlin Conference. From a decolonial standpoint, Beijing’s academic lawfare is fundamentally invalid because it systematically violates indigenous intellectual and territorial property rights.

The Ivatan people have occupied, cultivated, and defended their tana (land) since time immemorial  before any imperial official set foot on their shores. Under the core tenets of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, a community’s sovereignty over its ancestral waters and lands is grounded in historical continuity, ecological stewardship, and collective self-determination. The pre-colonial Ivatan society, defined by its fortified idjangs (mountain fortresses) and autonomous participation in the Maritime Jade Road, was a sovereign entity. To subsume their heritage under a Chinese claim based on ancient trade networks or proximity is an epistemic assault.

Furthermore, a progressive defense of national sovereignty rejects historical anachronisms; the territorial integrity of the Philippines is validated not by colonial treaties like the 1898 Treaty of Paris, but by the collective will and historic struggle of the Filipino masses against successive empires. Batanes is an inseparable fabric of that national struggle.

EDCA and the encirclement of China

Yet, while we must reject Beijing’s territorial overreach, we must be even more  unyielding in our critique of how this crisis is being instrumentalized at home. Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro and state-aligned maritime experts have swiftly utilized this academic provocation as the perfect pretext to beat the drums of war. Teodoro’s dismissals of the Chinese claim are not born out of a desire to protect Ivatan self-determination or national sovereignty but to legitimize the rapid hyper-militarization of the Luzon Strait. The current Marcos Jr. administration takes it for granted that the Philippines must naturally align its security apparatus with U.S. militarism, trading away actual sovereignty on the ground for Western approval.

Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), Batanes has been systematically converted into a forward-operating base for the Pentagon’s “First Island Chain” strategy—a blatant campaign for the military encirclement of China. Recent Balikatan exercises have shifted their focus northward, featuring American and Filipino troops practicing the “re-taking” of islands on the uninhabited outpost of Mavulis and near the provincial capital of Basco. The deployment of the US Army’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to these fragile islands serves an offensive imperialist purpose: to establish a choke point over the Bashi Channel. Teodoro presents a false binary—either accept Chinese encroachment or embrace American boots on the ground—actively reducing our country to a semi-colonial chessboard.

Ghost of 1941: RAA and Japanese remilitarization

This imperialist design is further compounded by the re-entry of Japanese militarism into the Philippine theater, carrying chilling echoes of historical trauma. The current deployment of Japanese forces under the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) directly parallels the tragic events of December 1941. Eighty-five years ago, the Imperial Japanese Army launched its invasion of the Philippines by first seizing Batan Island and the northern Luzon corridor as tactical stepping stones to neutralize American airpower. Today, under the dual approach of the RAA and Official Security Assistance (OSA), Tokyo returns to the exact same geography.

Functioning as a critical sub-imperial manager for Washington’s pivot to Asia, Japan has systematically dismantled its post-war pacifist constraints. Through OSA, Japan operates as the financial and material pipeline for this containment architecture, transferring advanced coastal radar networks and Abukuma-class destroyer escorts to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, effectively turning Batanes into a permanent listening post. Concurrently, the RAA provides the legal mechanism for the actual deployment of Japanese combat forces on Philippine soil. During recent maneuvers, Japanese Self-Defense Forces did not merely observe; they actively deployed and fired Type 88 surface-to-ship missiles from Philippine territory. When the comprador bourgeoisie in Manila celebrates these pacts as triumphs of a “rules-based international order,” they exhibit a profound colonial amnesia, sanitizing Japan’s brutal imperialist history to serve the immediate geopolitical anxieties of the Western hegemon.

Illusion of liberal internationalism

This reliance on liberal internationalism is typified by the mainstream fetishization of the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling at The Hague. While the ruling correctly invalidated China’s expansive, historically fabricated “nine-dash line,” a critical Global South critique reveals a deeply compromised reality. As scholars of TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) such as B.S. Chimni and Antony Anghie have long argued, modern international legal frameworks are not neutral arbiters but historical continuations of colonial governance.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was fundamentally shaped by Western maritime powers to secure “freedom of navigation”—a legal euphemism that guarantees the unimpeded, global military deployment of the US Navy. The United States hypocritically uses the Hague ruling as a moral cudgel against China despite the fact that Washington itself has consistently refused to ratify UNCLOS. For the Global South, relying solely on international courts creates the dangerous illusion that sovereignty is a gift granted by institutions in the West rather than a right won through popular struggle. This paper victory is weaponized by the elite in Manila to justify bringing in American military hardware, trading physical sovereignty on the ground for an abstract endorsement in Europe.

Kapianan* vs. imperial hegemony

On the ground, the indigenous Ivatan people are not passive spectators; they are a community increasingly alarmed by the rapid militarization of their ancestral domain. This state compliance with U.S.-Japan militarization is causing immediate, material harm to working-class Filipinos. The influx of military personnel, heavy equipment, and regular air and naval drills directly threatens the Ivatan way of life. Ancestral fishing grounds in the Bashi Channel are periodically closed or restricted during live-fire drills, cutting off local fishermen from their primary source of sustenance. Local activist groups and municipal leaders have voiced deep anxieties over the conversion of civilian infrastructure—such as local ports and airports—into dual-use military facilities, understanding that if the U.S. sparks a war over Taiwan, their home will be the first target for retaliatory strikes.

Confronted by this matrix of US-led imperialist aggression and state complicity, a clear framework of resistance emerges at the intersection of progressive mass struggle and Ivatan indigenous knowledge and practice. By synthesizing the foundational principles of the national democratic movement—historically championed by fisherfolk and peasant alliances—with the Ivatan’s ancestral systems of governance, we find a profound political and cultural counter-weight to this militarization. The Ivatan philosophy of kapianan  is an active, living ethos that stands in absolute defiance of the violent, transactional logic of foreign empires. When the defense of tana / land is wedded to the broader struggle against neo-colonial subjugation, it outlines an indivisible baseline for a non-aligned resistance—a posture fiercely independent of all foreign powers, which refuses to subordinate local survival to the strategic interests of foreign powers:

  • The immediate demilitarization of Batanes and the Luzon Strait, including the unconditional cessation of Balikatan exercises and all foreign live-fire missile drills on ancestral lands;
  • The junking of unequal military treaties, specifically EDCA, the VFA, and the RAA, which dismantle Philippine constitutional sovereignty;
  • The absolute protection of Ivatan ancestral domain  against both Chinese expansionist claims and US imperialist-led dual-use infrastructural takeovers; and
  • The re-assertion of a genuinely independent, non-aligned foreign policy that refuses to barter local lives for superpower hegemony.

For a solid anti-imperialist alternative

The situation in Batanes exposes a critical truth for the global anti-imperialist movement. Beijing’s challenge to U.S. hegemony is fundamentally driven by the construction of alternative global value chains and rival spheres of influence, rather than a genuine anti-imperialist project of national liberation. If China wishes to present its model as a progressive alternative to Western dominance, it cannot do so by permitting its state-aligned apparatus to flirt with the annexationist tactics of the very empire it seeks to displace. Should Beijing choose to weaponize these academic trial balloons to target the sovereign borders of a smaller neighbor, it exposes its alternative networks not as a break from imperialism, but as the infrastructure of a rival global power willing to inflict collateral damage on a U.S. semi-colony.

Let both Washington and Beijing take note: the national liberation struggle in the Philippines will not cower before old or new masters. We reject the false choice between US imperialist subjugation and Chinese expansionism. True national defense lies in the hands of an organized, sovereign populace that refuses to let its islands, its waters, and its indigenous heritages be bartered away in the marketplace of global powers.

Notes:

*Kapianan comes from the root word  vija or *pia (*goodness/peace) means a state of communal harmony, peace, and shared well-being.

References

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