On a scorching recent afternoon, fishermen from the sleepy Philippine town of Masinloc hauled blocks of ice onto a rickety, wooden fishing boat bobbing just off the shore. By nightfall, the boat would be on its way to coveted fishing grounds, and to a cat-and-mouse game with the Chinese coast guard.
The 9m boat, with bamboo outriggers to keep it stable in the often rough waters of the South China Sea, was bound for a reef known as the Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島).
Claimed by the Philippines, Taiwan and China, the area has long been the stuff of legend in Masinloc — a haven for blue marlin, red grouper, lobster, skipjack, yellowfin tuna and more.
“In Scarborough, you don’t have to catch the fish,” Jerry Escape, the town’s fisheries officer, said with a grin. “They just swim up to you and greet you and let you take them out of the water.”
Fish tales aside, the beleaguered boatmen in Masinloc have found themselves caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight that their country appears to be losing, at least for now.
For the past two years, the shoal has been controlled by China’s coast guard, and the Philippine fishermen who made their livings there find themselves mostly shut out of fisheries they depended on for decades.
“The fishermen have no choice,” Escape said. “They fish there until the Chinese chase them away.”
The shoal is just one of a number of places in the South China and East China seas caught in a tug-of-war between a rising China claiming vast swaths of resource-rich ocean and the other Asian nations that claim many of the same waters as their own.
This particular conflict came to a head in April 2012, when the Philippines accused Chinese fishermen of poaching protected coral and giant clams from the area, about 200km off the west coast of the Philippine island of Luzon.
A Philippine coast guard ship and several Chinese government ships were locked in a tense standoff for more than a month before the Filipinos withdrew. However, the Chinese ships never left, instead setting up regular patrols to block entry and protecting Chinese fishing boats in the area.
These days, the fishermen of Masinloc return to port with fewer fish and more tales of trying to edge as close to the triangle of azure water as possible to haul in as many fish as they can before they are chased away.
Mario Forones, 54, who returned in late March from a trip, said several of the Chinese ships constantly circled the reef while one planted itself inside, blocking any boats that might get past the first line of defense.
“If you get too close, they come at you in rubber boats and yell in English: ‘Go away! Go away,’” he said.
The Philippine military said that some fishermen have gotten rougher treatment. During a period of prime fishing in January, Chinese ships used water cannons to drive away some of the Philippine boats, officials said.
Though fishermen from more distant parts of the Philippines venture into these waters, they need larger, more expensive vessels to reach the area, load their catch and make it home, so they rely on it less.
However, for the people of Masinloc, the closest point in the Philippines to the shoal, the reef is considered an extension of the village.
From the town, a 9m fishing boat with a single engine can reach the shoal in about 18 hours, which had allowed the small-time fishermen to regularly take in more than a tonne of fish a day, even with their minimal resources.
The catch is especially crucial to the town, which has so far missed out on the economic surge that has made the Philippines one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia. The moribund town center features an open-air market and a mostly abandoned shopping mall. Vendors sell slippers and hot dogs from makeshift stalls, and customers are scarce.
Masinloc Mayor Desiree Edora said the town of about 45,000 was struggling to absorb the loss of business as fishermen returned from the shoal with smaller catches, affecting everyone from ice vendors and truckers to restaurant owners. Although she said she did not add up the losses in what is a lightly regulated industry here, she said they were substantial.
The local economy is based on fishing, rice farming and a coal-fired power plant that feeds electricity into the national grid. There are no factories or call centers to absorb the fishermen if they can no longer make a living off the shoal.
The Chinese claim the Scarborough Shoal based on ancient maps that identify most of the South China Sea as their territory.
The Philippine government has produced its own maps, showing the shoal to be part of the Philippines since at least 1734, when the islands were ruled by Spain.
Philippine officials say their country has maintained unbroken jurisdiction over the shoal since its independence in 1946, and say that the shoal is well within its 322km exclusive economic zone.
They have taken their claims — over Scarborough and other contested South China Sea areas — to a UN tribunal for arbitration, where they are wending their way through a review that is expected to take years.
So far, China has refused to participate.
In the past two weeks, the Philippines continued its campaign to expose what it describes as Chinese encroachment on its territory.
First it seized nine Chinese fishermen who it said it had caught poaching in another disputed area of the South China Sea, leading to an angry condemnation from Beijing. Then it publicized photographs of what it said was land-reclamation at yet another reef, suggesting the work was China’s way of solidifying its claims to that area.
Despite the government-to-government hostility, in Masinloc there is little talk among townspeople of a Chinese threat, as there is, for instance, in Japan. Instead, they voice tired resignation. They are used to being poor; even before the Chinese took over the shoal, they said, there were few signs of prosperity in the town.
While the town hopes to regain access to the shoal, Edora has taken other steps to try to help the fishermen. She has worked with the Philippine national government to provide them with artificial reefs that can be anchored to the ocean floor to attract fish, but she said the so-called aggregators had attracted far fewer fish than the natural reef so far.
“That area is ours,” Escape said. “But the Chinese are strong, so they can do what they like. We are weak, so there is nothing we can do.”
Tolomeo Forones, Mario’s brother and a part-time fisherman himself, said the solution was clear: Bring back US bases. He said that when the US military maintained bases in the Philippines, the Chinese coast guard was never seen near the country.
In the short term, that looks unlikely. The US and the Philippines recently forged a deal that would establish military facilities — mostly on the coastlines facing China — that are expected to host large US warships and possibly squadrons of US fighter jets. However, it could take several years to get those facilities up and running.
Tolomeo Forones said he felt that the best chance for his weaker nation to stand up to China had been squandered years ago, when the Philippines in the 1990s ejected the US military from its former naval base at Subic Bay, just 113km south of Masinloc.
“If Subic was still a US Navy base, those Chinese would not be there,” Forones said. “Now that the Americans have moved out, the Chinese have claimed our islands. They aren’t afraid of our navy. They only laugh at us.”
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