Hit three times on Saturday, August 31, by a Chinese coastguard vessel, the Teresa-Magbanuathe largest ship in the Philippine Coast Guard fleet, suffered damage – including a hole in the top of its hull. The incident took place in the Spratly Islands, near Sabina Bank, a group of reefs with a lagoon located 70 nautical miles (130 kilometers) from Palawan, the largest island in the western Philippines. Sabina has become the new flashpoint between Beijing and Manila in the South China Sea.
The reasons for the discord are not new: the Philippines considers itself within its rights to patrol these waters, since the Sabina Bank is part, according to the law of the sea, of its exclusive economic zone (within 200 miles of the coast), as confirmed by the Hague Court of Arbitration in 2016, when the Philippines was invited to rule on its disputes with China. China, which rejected this decision, claims a “territorial sea”the famous “ten-point line” which would encompass the entire South China Sea, in defiance of the Philippines’ rights to any exclusive economic zone.
But Beijing is no longer content to harass the Philippine coast guard over the loudspeaker, ordering them to leave the so-called “Chinese territorial waters” : “This is the first time that the “Teresa-Magbanua” has been directly targeted. And this reflects a significant escalation,” says maritime security expert Raymond Powell, who leads the SeaLight research project on tensions in the South China Sea at Stanford University. According to Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela’s account of the collision on August 31, the Philippine ship was surrounded during the incident by five Chinese maritime militia vessels, three coast guard vessels (including the one that struck it from the bow and then the stern) and two Chinese navy tugboats – a detail that raises questions about Beijing’s intentions.
Aging wreck
China, for its part, accused the Philippine ship of having “deliberately drove into the Chinese vessel 5205 in an unprofessional and dangerous manner, causing a collision for which the Philippines bears full responsibility”according to Chinese Coast Guard spokesman Liu Dejun. However, the videos, even those released by the Chinese daily Global Times, show the opposite. In the pages of this ultranationalist mouthpiece of the Communist Party, Chinese experts accuse the Philippines of “illegally occupy the Sabina Bank by anchoring their ship there”and to want “replay the move” from Second Thomas Bank, another reef about sixty kilometers from Sabina Bank, on which the Philippine Navy ran aground twenty-five years ago, in 1999, an old warship, the BRP Sierra Madre, to serve as a floating garrison against the Chinese advance.
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