Tokyo-Manila 'maritime deal' a dangerous illusion

The recent announcement of private negotiations between Tokyo and Manila to "delimit overlapping maritime entitlements" between Japan's Ryukyu Islands and the Philippine island of Luzon is being celebrated by the media in those countries as a "victory for peace" and the so-called "rules-based order". In reality, the agreement is a high-stakes political illusion.

Sharing overlapping maritime zones, such as exclusive economic zones and continental shelves where countries hold rights to fish and drill for oil, is a standard diplomatic practice. The glaring flaw in these negotiations is that Japan and the Philippines have excluded the central stakeholder: China.

By holding these talks behind closed doors, Tokyo and Manila are disregarding the existence of China's Taiwan island, which lies directly between their coastlines. This backdoor deal is an illegitimate encroachment on China's maritime entitlements that violates the United Nations Charter, breaches the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and undermines the one-China principle. Any boundary line set by these two countries without China's involvement will be legally void under international law.

Even a basic understanding of geography will tell you why these talks are a sham. The waters of the Bashi Channel and the Luzon Strait are not a swimming pool shared by two neighbors. They are a bustling maritime corridor surrounded by three distinct coastlines: Japan's southern Ryukyu Islands to the north, the Philippines' Luzon and Batanes islands to the south, and the eastern coast of China's Taiwan island to the west.

International law does not allow two countries to ignore a major geographic neighbor just because it makes their negotiations easier. Excluding China's coastlines from their calculation corrupts the deal from the outset. Such an agreement holds no legal weight whatsoever.

The real motive of this secret deal is a dangerous political gamble concerning the Taiwan question. By bypassing Beijing and drawing borders that exclude Taiwan's maritime rights, Japan and the Philippines are trying to portray the island's sovereignty as separate from China.

Under international law, the one-China principle is a binding framework formalized by the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758. It recognizes that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. Therefore, all sovereign rights over Chinese territory — including Taiwan and its surrounding waters — belong exclusively to the PRC.

The UN Charter explicitly forbids countries from infringing upon the territory and rights of another nation. While this is often associated with military aggression, modern international rules clearly state that using backroom diplomacy to secretly carve up another country's economic waters is another form of theft. Tokyo and Manila are essentially trying to usurp China's maritime entitlements where China has legitimate claims and present Beijing with a fait accompli before it can respond.

If the UN Charter points to the political flaws of the deal, the UNCLOS highlights its practical failures. Ocean laws explicitly state that when countries have overlapping claims, they must find a solution that is fair to everyone. International law uses a strict formula: mapping out every coastline in the area to ensure the water distribution matches each country's coastal length.

By excluding China, Japan and the Philippines are using fake data to create a legal fiction. Furthermore, global rules state that countries cannot enter into agreements to allocate resources such as fish, oil, or sub-sea minerals that are legitimately claimed by a non-consenting third party. Given that China's natural underwater territory extends into this proposed line, the very subject of their talks involves the illegal distribution of China's ocean resources.

For years, Tokyo and Manila have traveled the world lecturing others on the sanctity of international law. Yet, when the law becomes geopolitically inconvenient, they abandon its core principles — consensus, fair geography, and the one-China principle — in favor of raw power politics.

International law cannot be wielded selectively. A world where exclusive alliances can simply vote away the geography and sovereign rights of a neighboring country is one governed by lawless coalitions, not courts. Normalizing this behavior sets a perilous global precedent, encouraging states anywhere to form private huddles and wipe their so-called competitors' economic zones off the map.

Under Article 34 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Beijing is fully justified under international law to treat any line drawn by Tokyo and Manila as null and void.

History and geography mean that the complex waters of the Western Pacific cannot be carved up by a cozy deal between Tokyo and Manila. If Japan and the Philippines truly wish to protect the rule of law, they must halt this exclusionary behavior. Until they are ready to respect the UN Charter, honor the one-China principle, and acknowledge the true trilateral realities demanded by science and geography, their lines will remain nothing more than an illusion drawn upon the water.

The author is a research fellow at the Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University.

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