Sino-Philippine Border in the South China Sea: Scarborough Shoal at the Turn of the 20th Century

The South China Sea is currently the arena of a territorial conflict between China and the Philippines for the sovereignty of Scarborough Shoal, a conflict that has recently called the attention of the international community since its occupation by Chinese naval forces in 2012 and by the award of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 against Beijing. As both states have constructed claims on historical grounds, it seems imperative to inquire into the historical narrative of borderland demarcation in the area. The presentation analyzes whether and how Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Dao in Chinese, Bajo de Masinloc in Tagalog) was placed both by China and the Philippines as part of their border territory in the South China Sea by the turn of the 20^th century, and how this particular area has been imagined or re-imagined as a national frontier. It argues that the inclusion of this shoal into their respective national territory, if it occurred, by the end of the 19th Century and the turn of the 20th, was shaped by both the internal politics during the last years of the Qing Dynasty in China, and by the power relations struggle between Spain and the United Stated before and after the 1898 Treaty of Paris demarcating the Philippines’ territory. The research also evaluates to what extent the making of the frontier and borderland around Scarborough Shoal should be a product of modern interpretations of historical sources, and how the nature of this bilateral conflict since the early-1990s has shaped the narrative of frontier and borderland making between China and the Philippines, with its political and legal implications for the coming years.