China Power | Society | East Asia

As China Claims Philippines’ Batanes, Taiwan Emphasizes Kinship

Historical links between the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan and the Philippines are dovetailing with present-day geopolitical concerns.

Tao people from Taiwan’s Orchid Island row a traditional boat en route to the Philippines’ Batanes Islands, June 14, 2026.

In June, a wooden plank vessel set out from Taiwan’s Orchid Island to Batanes in the Philippines. The vessel, named the Ovayan – meaning Golden Friendship – was a type of traditional vessel known as an ipanitika used by the Indigenous Tao people of Orchid Island. 

Carrying 20 rowers at a time – accompanied by 40 other members of the Tao community on a support vessel, who helped take turns rowing – the Ovayan took about 24 hours to reach Batanes, the Philippines’ northernmost and smallest province. The Ovayan will remain in Batanes on display for six months before a delegation of rowers from Batanes sails it back to Orchid Island. 

The voyage, retracing an ancient trade route, was meant to renew cultural and historical ties between Orchid Island and Batanes, said to have been disrupted 300 years ago by a misunderstanding. 

The residents of Batanes are closely related to the Tao people. In fact, upon arriving in Batanes, the travelers remarked on the similarity of local cuisine to their native Tao food. The language spoken by the Tao is the only Indigenous Taiwanese language that is not classified as part of the Formosan grouping of Austronesian languages. Instead, it is classified as Philippine, and specifically part of the Batanic language branch of Malayo-Polynesian. 

More broadly, Austronesian migration spans from Taiwan to Indonesia to Madagascar, New Zealand, Easter Island, and elsewhere. The “out of Taiwan” thesis posits that Taiwan is the origin of Austronesian peoples as dispersed across the Asia-Pacific. 

A member of the Tao boat crew from Taiwan’s Orchid Island is greeted upon arrival at Philippines’ Batanes Islands, June 15, 2026. Photo via Facebook/ Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation (IPCF).

It proved an odd sequel to this event, then, when a group of Chinese academics sparked widespread outrage in the Philippines after a conference that framed Batanes as historically being part of China. The claims were made at a conference at Jinan University in Guangzhou, but did not fail to be noticed by Philippine media. Among the participants were academics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, and the Ocean University of China. 

The scholars claimed that Batanes was administered from Taiwan during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and that the islands did not fall under the 1898 Treaty of Paris or the 1946 Treaty of Manila as territory administered by the Philippines. As such, the scholars called on China to “safeguard China’s sovereignty of the Batanes Islands.” The historical and cultural links between the people of the Batanes Islands and the Tao, as well as the fact that the Batanes Islands were used as fishing grounds during the Qing dynasty by Chinese fishermen, was highlighted to bolster these assertions. 

The scholars primarily seemed to be reacting to warming ties between Japan and the Philippines, as part of which the Marcos and Takaichi administrations have agreed to begin maritime delimitation talks. The exclusive economic zones of both countries overlap in waters east of Taiwan. While the talks are framed as being in line with the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Chinese academics who asserted Chinese claims over the Batanes Islands accused the Philippines and Japan as being the ones to violate UNCLOS. 

The talks are occurring at a sensitive anniversary for maritime disputes in the region, in that this month marks the 10-year anniversary since a U.N. arbitral tribunal formed under UNCLOS ruled against China and in favor of the Philippines in a dispute over China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea. China has rejected the ruling’s legitimacy, while critics point to the fact that China had tried to claim nearly all of the South China Sea. 

For its part, Taiwan has criticized being left out of multilateral arbitration mechanisms. In terms of the 2016 ruling, Taiwan objected to the fact that Taiping Island, also known as Itu Aba – the largest natural feature in the Spratly Island group, administered by Taiwan – was deemed to be a rock rather........

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