Claim: The island of Palawan was once part of China and was called “Zheng He Island” after the famous Chinese explorer who sailed the seas and oceans of Asia from the 1300s to the 1400s.
Rating: FALSE
Why we fact-checked this: The TikTok video containing the claim has 71,700 views, 1,202 likes, 113 shares, and 345 comments as of writing.
The video originated from Chinese social media apps and included the caption: “Luzon Island and Zheng He Island, China has had jurisdiction over them since ancient times, and our 10,000-ton coast guard ships cruise between them, which is legal and compliant.”
The facts: The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) strongly condemned and refuted the claim, calling it “baseless and inaccessible historical fiction” built on “questionable historical data.”
In a statement on February 28, the NHCP said there is no historical evidence to support claims of a settlement of a permanent Chinese population in Palawan.
“From a historical perspective, no accounts of Chinese settlement were seen in available documents, as early as 1521, through the accounts of Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta who was part of the first circumnavigation of the world. Palawan was populated by communities of similar cultural affinity with the rest of our archipelago,” the NHCP said.
The commission added that historical maps and treaties confirm that Palawan has always been part of the Philippine archipelago, first under the Sultanate of Sulu and later under the Spanish Captain-Generalcy of the Philippines. The 1898 Treaty of Paris, as amended by the 1900 Treaty of Washington, further solidified Palawan’s inclusion in the present-day territory of the Philippines.
The NHCP also dismissed China’s “flip-flopping” claims, noting that the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling declared Beijing’s nine-dash line illegal. The commission said it stands by the Philippine government’s stance that no part of the Philippines is up for negotiation, asserting, “Palawan is and will always be Filipino.”
Misinterpretation of history: Public historian and professor Xiao Chua further debunked similar claims, explaining that Zheng He’s voyages, as recorded in historical accounts, were missions to the Western Oceans, not the Eastern Seas where the Philippines is located. His voyages took him to Southern Vietnam, Thailand, the Indian Ocean, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Persian Gulf, and the East African coast — but never to the Philippines.
Similarly, in 2018, former Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio refuted Chinese President Xi Jinping’s claim that Zheng He had visited the Philippines. In his 2017 e-book, “The South China Sea Dispute: Philippine Sovereign Rights and Jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea,” Carpio explained that this belief stems from a misinterpretation of historical records. He cited historian Professor Hsu Yun Ts’iao, who argued that “Chan Cheng,” thought to be an old Chinese name for the Philippines, was actually the Ming Dynasty’s name for a Malay state in Indo-China.
Government response: In a Malacañang press briefing on March 3, Palace Press Officer and Undersecretary Atty. Claire Castro reiterated the government’s stance on upholding Philippine sovereignty and the 2016 Hague ruling that dismissed China’s sweeping claims over the contested South China Sea.
Meanwhile, in an interview on DZBB on Tuesday, March 4, National Security Council (NSC) Assistant Director General Jonathan Malaya said they are currently tracing where the misleading posts originated. He added that the posts seem to have been intended for Chinese audiences and were designed to “elicit nationalist sentiment” among them. – Marjuice Destinado/Rappler.com
Marjuice Destinado is a Rappler intern. She is a third-year political science student at Cebu Normal University (CNU), serving as feature editor of Ang Suga, CNU’s official student publication.
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