TikTok accounts reassert historically challenged Chinese claim over Palawan
Screenshot of Tiktok video falsely asserting that China has a historical claim over the Palawan island group.
As the maritime dispute between the Philippines and China over the West Philippine Sea persists, an emerging wave of social media posts has falsely reasserted China’s questionable historical claims over the Palawan island group.
In posts circulating on vertical-video platform TikTok, Palawan has been wrongfully referred to as “Zhenghe Island,” allegedly named after a Ming Dynasty explorer whom the posts falsely claimed had discovered the islands.
Historical evidence, however, disputes this, as anthropological findings confirm that ancient Filipinos have inhabited the islands as early as 14,000 B.C., as proven by the carbon-dated human remains found in the Tabon caves.
A historical account from the earlier Song Dynasty, Chu Fan Chih, written by a maritime trade official named Chao Ju-kua in 1225, already referred to Palawan as “Pa-lao-yu.”
Moreover, such references were in the context of trading relations, according to the historian William Henry Scott in the book “Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History,” published in 1984 and reprinted in 2022 (pages 65-67).
Some places in pre-Hispanic Philippines such as Butuan in fact paid tribute to China but the tributary states “did not become colonies or part of the imperial administrative system,” according Scott (p. 65). It’s curious that there are no trending Chinese claims to Butuan, which is in northern Mindanao.
The social media posts also never acknowledged how Palawan became colonized by Spaniards, who named one of its islands “Paragua” and the island group as “Calamianes”; became part of the Sulu sultanate; and was then passed on to the American colonial government without any violent reaction from imperial China. Sulu was in fact another tributary state, and yet there’s no Chinese social media campaign to reclaim it.
The posts also falsely claimed that Palawan falls within China’s baseless and ever-changing nine-dash line claim over the region, which has been invalidated by the arbitral ruling of 2016.
Luzon a part of China?
On X (formerly Twitter), user @BeijingDai doubled-down on disinformation, not only by repeating that China has some historical claim over Palawan but also asserting that the entirety of Luzon has “historical ties with the Chinese” as well.
In a tweet that has since garnered more than 55,000 views, the user falsely claimed that the name “Luzon” originated from “Lusongguo,” supposedly meaning “Lesser Song Kingdom” in Chinese, referring to the Song Dynasty that ruled China from 960 AD to 1279.
However, according to the 2004 encyclopedia Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, Luzon’s etymology comes from the Tagalog “lusong” which is a “wooden mortar used to pound rice (page 178).”
Various maps found by PressOne.PH, made as early as 1598, had documented Luzon as “Luconia,” later modifying the “c” to “z” to better reflect the original Tagalog pronunciation.
Screenshot of Tiktok video falsely asserting that China has a historical claim over the Palawan island group.
A 2021 anthropological study also challenges the false historical claim, dating a human fossil discovered in Callao Cave in northern Luzon to 67,000 years ago.
Referred to as the “Callao Man” or Homo luzonensis, the fossil provided the earliest direct evidence of human presence in the Philippines.
Influence operations
As of writing, PressOne.PH has identified at least six versions of a video asserting China’s imagined historical claim over Palawan reposted by multiple TikTok accounts, some of which have usernames written in Chinese. The earliest post monitored appeared on Jan. 27.
Screenshots of TikTok videos observed by PressOne.PH falsely asserting the same narrative that China has a historical claim over the Palawan island group.
While all versions rely on Chinese text edited directly onto the videos to support the narrative, only two feature a Mandarin voice-over, while the other four play only background music as animated lines separate Palawan from the rest of the Philippines.
This is not the first time that suspicious online behavior from social media accounts with names written in Chinese characters has been flagged for such activity. Since November 2024, PressOne.PH has been monitoring a network of X accounts spreading anti-Filipino sentiment while pushing social media engagement around Vice President Sara Duterte who has remained silent on the sea dispute.
To date, PressOne.PH has identified 140 accounts simultaneously generating upwards of 1,700 repetitive tweets targeting Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the country’s efforts to solidify its claim over features within the country’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone. Felipe F. Salvosa II, Nikko Balbedina
Chinese-linked network amplifies anti-PH sentiment while pushing content related to Sara Duterte
Sara Duterte-related content gets push from network of dubious Chinese X accounts
Chinese accounts resurface fake ‘Polvoron’ video on X after Marcos Jr. signs Maritime Zones Law
This report was made possible by an Internews project to build the capacity of news organizations in understanding disinformation and influence operations in the Philippines.
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