Carpio calls China's territorial claims a ‘gigantic fraud on the human race’

China's massive claims across the South China Sea were the fake news of the century that needed to be corrected, according to Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio.

"I call this the fake history of the millennium, fake news of the century. I call this the gigantic fraud on the human race," Carpio said during his keynote address at the Ateneo de Davao's Democracy and Disinformation forum on Friday.

He underscored that China spoon-fed these claims to its people and something had to be done to rectify the narrative.

"This historical narrative is taught to every Chinese citizen from grade school to college... They know this by heart and they really believe it, they sincerely believe it," Carpio said.

The Philippines and China are both claimants to a portion of the South China Sea. An international tribunal ruling invalidated China's claims in 2016, but Beijing refused to acknowledge it.

Debunking false claims

In a presentation, Carpio showed maps from Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties which indicate that Hainan had consistently been the southernmost territory of China—not the Paracels, Spratlys, nor the Scarborough Shoal.

Carpio pointed out that it was only in 1932 that China made a note verbale that the Paracels belonged to it; 1946 was when it started to claim the Spratlys; and only after 1947 did China give a name to the Scarborough Shoal.

He also refuted China's claim that one of the 27 observatories put up by Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing during the Yuan Dynasty was built in the Scarborough Shoal.

"The biggest rock on the Scarborough Shoal is just 2 to 3 meters above water at high tide, and not more than six to 10 people can stand on it," Carpio's presentation read.

"Physically, the massive astronomical observatories that Guo Shoujing erected in other places in China could not possibly fit on the tiny rocks of the Scarborough Shoal," it added. "Legally, China cannot now claim that Scarborough Shoal is the Nanhai Island that Guo Shoujing visited in 1279 because China had already used this argument against Vietnam in 1980."

Convincing the Chinese people

Carpio said that one significant measure to debunk "the grandest disinformation that a country has inflicted to the world since World War II" is to educate and convince the Chinese people with the truth that the lone historical narrative they learned was "totally false."

"I cannot expect the Chinese government to comply with the ruling because if it complies with the ruling today, the Chinese people will overthrow the Chinese government for giving away the sacred territory of China. They have a mantra—we will not give up a square inch of Chinese territory that was bequeathed to us by our ancestors through the centuries," he said.

"We cannot expect the Chinese government to tell the Chinese people that it's fake history. We have to do it ourselves and this will take time," he added.

Carpio believed that through the multi-sectoral efforts to educate the Chinese people, they would, in the long run, be able to swallow the bitter pill and accept the fact that the South China Sea never belonged to the Asian powerhouse 2,000 years ago. — Dona Magsino/DVM, GMA News