China Says Batanes 'Belong to China' — Experts Warn Its Gray Zone Has Turned Darker

China's coast guard vessels are now patrolling waters far east of Taiwan — beyond even the "ten-dash line" Beijing drew on its own 2023 standard map — and analysts say the operations mark a deliberate new phase in China's maritime expansion, one built on a manufactured "sovereignty narrative" and aimed at a supply route Beijing has long coveted: the Bashi Channel.​

The trigger, at least nominally, was a legal process between two of China's neighbors. Following their May 28 summit, Japan and the Philippines announced they would open formal negotiations to delimit overlapping portions of their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and continental shelves in the Pacific, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The summit also deepened bilateral strategic ties, with Tokyo planning to sell warships to Manila and elevating the Philippines to Japan's first "comprehensive strategic partner" in Southeast Asia.

Beijing reacted immediately. Its foreign ministry declared the talks "completely illegal and invalid," and Chinese government vessels began patrolling the waters east of Taiwan. Then, on July 9, Communist Party media went a step further — publishing academics' claims that the Philippines' Batan Islands are "a natural geographical extension of Taiwan" whose "sovereignty belongs to China."

A Symposium Built to Order: Beijing's Batanes Narrative

The party mouthpiece  Global Times reported that a symposium on the sovereignty of the Batan Islands was held June 30 at Jinan University in Guangzhou. Participants, the outlet said, unanimously concluded that the islands are a natural extension of Taiwan, that their sovereignty belongs to China, and that the Japan-Philippines delimitation talks carry no legal force.

Ju Hailong, dean of Jinan University's School of International Relations, was quoted arguing that the Batan Islands fell under the jurisdiction of Taiwan Prefecture during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and that the northernmost island lies just 99 kilometers from Taiwan's Orchid Island (Lanyu). Other scholars claimed the islands' more than 10,000 Ivatan inhabitants share linguistic and cultural roots with Lanyu's Tao people — roots that, in their telling, "originate from China."

Beijing has run this playbook before. In 2024, state broadcaster CGTN aired a documentary "This Is China's South China Sea" asserting that the South China Sea islands have been Chinese territory "since ancient times," citing field surveys, expert interviews and historical materials. Radio Free Asia's Asia Fact Check Lab examined the documentary's "evidence" at the time and found much of it to be one-sided or historically incomplete.

Raymond Powell, director of the maritime transparency initiative SeaLight, told the National West Philippine Sea Summit on July 9 that a month and a half of monitoring China's activity east of Taiwan reveals the mechanics of Chinese "lawfare": Beijing does not actually need international law's endorsement. What it needs is a narrative it can sell to enough people — backed by military and paramilitary force.

Powell displayed China's 2023 standard map, which shows a ten-dash line east of Taiwan. "If you compare that to where the patrols have been going, you'll notice they go far east of where the ten-dash line is — beyond where China has previously claimed," he said. China has completed its first patrol and begun a second, which was temporarily suspended due to a typhoon. Going forward, Powell warned, China intends to run intrusive patrols along the Japan-Philippines EEZ boundary — by its own rhetoric, "perpetually" and with "no further notice."

Powell calls this a "pretext to escalate." The pretext was the delimitation talks; the escalation is already underway and designed to continue indefinitely. "China saw an opportunity," he said. The talks gave Beijing cover "to do something they wanted to do anyway" — patrol east of Taiwan into the Philippine Sea, outside the ten-dash line — and the Jinan University symposium supplied the legal veneer after the fact.

The underlying motive, Powell argued, is China's interest in a critical supply line it feels it does not sufficiently control: the Bashi Channel. Beijing is happy to assert its claims with paramilitary forces — the China Coast Guard, its ubiquitous maritime militia, and other government vessels — "of course backed by military force."

Notably, Powell does not believe China wants to win the argument over who owns the Batan Islands, nor does he expect an invasion. What he expects is that Beijing will use the islands to justify an EEZ claim extending eastward, with the Batanes as China's baseline.

Atsuko Kanehara, a senior advisor at Japan's Sasakawa Peace Foundation who also spoke at the summit, stressed that China's repeated violations of international law cannot change the existing legal status quo. "International law gives us the legal justification for our position, and the legal understanding that what China is doing is illegal," she said. Since neither Japan nor the Philippines possesses military power equivalent to China's, they cannot violate international law by force and must rely on international rules instead — which is precisely why both countries need the support of other nations that value international law. "International law gives us a common narrative."

The South China Sea Playbook Moves North

The pattern is familiar. Writing for Australia's Lowy Institute on June 18, Florida International University's Jing Ge argued that China is using coast guard operations to assert jurisdiction east of Taiwan just as it did in the South China Sea — repackaging a normal bilateral legal process as a pretext to extend its jurisdictional claims. "China is building a layered and coordinated maritime pressure structure whose intensity can be raised or lowered at any time," she wrote.

The waters east of Taiwan have long served as the "rear area" of Taiwan's defense system. They face the Western Pacific and connect the Bashi Channel, the waters north of Luzon, Japan's southwestern islands and the outer edge of the First Island Chain — a maritime space through which Australia, Japan, the Philippines and the United States maintain sea lines of communication, security cooperation and crisis access. China is now working to erode that rear-area status through expanding air, naval and coast guard operations.

From June 6 to 10, China's Ministry of Transport organized what it called a "special maritime traffic law-enforcement and hydrographic survey operation" east of Taiwan, deploying several large vessels from agencies including the Fujian and Guangdong Maritime Safety Administrations. Taiwanese authorities condemned Chinese coast guard personnel for harassing commercial vessels — demanding their ports of departure and destination — in an attempt to create the appearance that China exercises jurisdiction over the waters.

Jing Ge warned that these "law-enforcement operations" aim to recast the waters east of Taiwan as an area China can administratively claim and manage. Coast guard vessels, unlike warships, let Beijing dress up cross-boundary activity as routine governance. If Chinese coast guard ships begin appearing regularly east of Lanyu and Green Island, or broadcasting warnings and questioning commercial vessels southeast of Taiwan, China can gradually rebrand waters outside its effective jurisdiction as places where it "enforces the law," "manages" activity and "maintains traffic safety."

The gray-zone toolkit extends further. Under the guise of navigational safety, maritime traffic management, undersea cable inspection and hydrographic surveying, China is sending patrol and survey vessels east of Taiwan to collect baseline data for future blockade operations and submarine activity. Information on shipping routes, commercial traffic flows, undersea infrastructure, anchorage areas, water depth and sea conditions is inherently dual-use — giving Beijing the maritime data it needs to systematically prepare for more intense coercion.

Taiwan and its partners, she concluded, face a cross-agency, sustainable pressure system. If these normalized gray-zone operations are not identified and disrupted in time, "the waters east of Taiwan could become another testing ground for China's coercive erosion of the regional rules-based order."

China's gray-zone campaign has been building for nearly two decades. Writing June 25 for the National Bureau of Asian Research's Mapping China's Strategic Space project, Meikai University professor Tetsuo Kotani traced Beijing's systematic use of gray-zone tactics in the East China Sea — actions that challenge the status quo without triggering war — back to 2008, and identified the 2021 Coast Guard Law as a decisive turning point.

The law placed the China Coast Guard under the centralized command of the People's Armed Police and unambiguously defined it as a quasi-military organization. While it codified rules of engagement and weapons authorization, Kotani noted, its definition of "jurisdictional waters" remains "a unilateral construct fundamentally incompatible with international law," particularly UNCLOS.

The hardware has changed too. The China Coast Guard traditionally deploys in four-ship formations, with typically only one vessel carrying a large-caliber autocannon. That has shifted drastically over the past five years: it is now standard for all four ships in a formation to be heavily armed with large-caliber weaponry.

China's maritime expansion has driven home for Japan that Taiwan's security is inseparable from its own. Kotani noted that China's East China Sea gray-zone strategy is inextricably linked to the geopolitical dynamics surrounding Taiwan.

After then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, China launched unprecedented, large-scale retaliatory military exercises, during which several People's Liberation Army ballistic missiles landed inside Japan's EEZ. The drills forced Japanese fishing operations to halt and commercial shipping to reroute — stark proof, Kotani wrote, that "a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency" is no hypothetical. Since then, the PLA has normalized large-scale exercises around Taiwan, sustaining immense psychological and military pressure on neighboring countries, including Japan.

China's gray-zone strategy now covers the entire East China Sea and has definitively crossed the First Island Chain into the Western Pacific. Most alarming, Kotani argued, is how sophisticated and hybrid the methodology has become: "By synchronizing the armed CCG, PLA Navy warships, vast fishing fleets serving as maritime militia, maritime survey vessels, and an expanding fleet of UAVs, China has transformed the traditional gray zone into a darker, more volatile spectrum that precariously borders on armed conflict."