A decade on, China and the Philippines are still arguing over a court ruling neither side will enforce

On 10 July 2026, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper joined a coordinated diplomatic offensive against the Philippines over a court ruling that, on paper at least, Manila won a decade ago. People’s Daily accused Manila of “political provocation” for continuing to invoke the 12 July 2016 award of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which invalidated the legal basis of China’s nine-dash-line claim to most of the South China Sea. The editorial line, picked up across state outlets, is the clearest sign yet that Beijing has no intention of letting the award lapse quietly, even as the Philippines’ own lead counsel concedes that the ruling’s practical force has been steadily diluted by a decade of Chinese activity on the water.

Ten years on, the dispute is no longer about a single legal text. It is about which set of facts on the water gets treated as normal. Beijing’s message to Manila, to Hanoi, to Kuala Lumpur and to every external maritime power is that the arbitration exists in a courtroom in The Hague and nowhere else. Manila’s message, harder to deliver and easier to erode, is that the ruling exists wherever its lawyers can get a court to read it.

The argument Beijing is making this week

The People’s Daily intervention is not a stray editorial. It comes on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the award and slots into a coordinated messaging push that has run through Chinese embassies, the foreign ministry’s daily briefings and state broadcasters for several weeks. The framing is consistent: the 2016 ruling is the product of a unilateral Philippine initiation, an arbitration tribunal of questionable composition, and a process that Beijing boycotted from start to finish. To treat it as binding, in this telling, is to substitute foreign adjudication for the patient diplomacy that Beijing insists has kept the regional peace.

That diplomatic line is anchored in two standing positions. First, China has never accepted the tribunal’s jurisdiction and rejects the award as a nullity. Second, disputes in the South China Sea, in Beijing’s reading, are to be settled between the claimants themselves through bilateral negotiation and through the framework of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, with the binding Code of Conduct negotiations — long-stalled, periodically revived — as the institutional destination. The People’s Daily line is the press translation of that position: the Philippines is wasting political capital on a document that nobody with maritime power in the region will enforce.

The argument is not without internal coherence. The tribunal itself was constituted under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and Annex VII awards are formally binding under UNCLOS Article 296. But binding and enforceable are different verbs. There is no UNCLOS enforcement mechanism beyond the dispute-settlement system that produced the award in the first place. Beijing’s wager has always been that the absence of a sheriff is itself a fact on the water, and that a decade of facts on the water tends to outlast a verdict in a courtroom.

What Manila’s own lawyer says

The harder edge of this story sits inside the Philippine camp. Speaking on the tenth-anniversary record, the Philippines’ lead counsel in the arbitration has acknowledged, in terms reported by Nikkei Asia, that Beijing’s actions over the past decade have weakened the practical impact of the award. The admission is striking because it is delivered not by a Manila politician under opposition pressure but by the lawyer who argued the case.

The trajectory he is describing is familiar to anyone tracking the waterway. Chinese coast guard vessels have maintained a near-continuous presence around Second Thomas Shoal, the site of the Sierra Madre grounding that keeps a small Philippine marine detachment in place. New artificial islands have been built, fortified, and equipped with airstrips, port facilities, and reported military-grade installations at Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief Reefs. Routine patrols by the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the China Coast Guard have expanded to cover Scarborough Shoal, which the tribunal ruled China had no lawful basis to claim but from which Philippine fishermen report being turned back. A 2023 baseline law and a 2024 enforcement ordinance from Beijing have layered domestic legal authority over waters and features the tribunal placed beyond China’s historical reach.

Each of these moves is, individually, an act of administrative consolidation. In aggregate, they amount to the construction of a maritime status quo that does not require any party to formally repudiate the ruling to render it less and less relevant to the day-to-day business of fishing, surveying, and patrolling.

The court ruling in plain terms

To understand why the dispute is still alive, it is worth recalling what the award actually said. The arbitral tribunal, constituted under UNCLOS Annex VII and chaired by Judge Thomas A. Mensah of Ghana with four co-arbitrators from France, Japan, the Netherlands and Poland, ruled on three substantive points that mattered for Manila.

First, it held that there was no legal basis for China’s nine-dash-line claim to historic rights over the waters and resources of the South China Sea. Second, it ruled that none of the Spratly features claimed by China, including the artificial islands, are capable of generating an exclusive economic zone of their own — a finding that collapsed the maritime zones Beijing had drawn around its reclamations. Third, it found that China had violated UNCLOS through its interference with Philippine fishing and exploration at Scarborough Shoal and at Reed Bank.

The award did not, contrary to some readings at the time, decide sovereignty over the islands themselves. Sovereignty was deliberately left to a future process. What it did was strip away the legal architecture China had built to convert its nine-dash-line cartography into enforceable jurisdiction. That is the architecture Beijing has spent the last decade rebuilding, this time in concrete, steel, and patrol hours rather than in claim lines on a map.

Why the dispute refuses to die

The argument that the award is now a dead letter has two structural problems that keep surfacing in legal commentary and diplomatic practice.

The first is the precedent problem. The Philippines was the third state to bring a UNCLOS Annex VII arbitration, after Bangladesh and Myanmar and before the recent Mauritius–United Kingdom case. The Annex VII machinery exists precisely because the drafters of UNCLOS recognised that a convention designed to govern the oceans needed a backstop for the disputes bilateral negotiation could not resolve. If a permanent tribunal award can be neutralised by a decade of non-compliance plus domestic legislation, the backstop is, in practice, optional. That is a problem not only for Manila but for every coastal state that might one day want to invoke UNCLOS against a more powerful neighbour.

The second is the evidence problem. The tribunal’s findings were not abstract. They were built on hydrographic data, on the records of Chinese official statements, on the history of fishing access, and on the observable geography of features that are or are not above water at high tide. To set that evidence aside is to argue, in effect, that the ocean’s geology is whatever the most powerful regional actor says it is. That is not a position the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been willing to adopt as a bloc, even if individual members have been willing to look away when it is convenient.

These two pressures are why the tenth anniversary matters beyond the calendars of the two principal litigants. The European Union and the United States continue to file regular diplomatic notes reaffirming the award’s binding character. ASEAN’s own statements, even those watered down to consensus language, have repeatedly cited the importance of UNCLOS and the need to respect legal processes. None of that translates directly into a coast guard cutter. But it does mean that the cost of openly repudiating the ruling, for China, would be paid in diplomatic capital that Beijing has so far preferred to avoid spending.

The structural frame

What we are watching is a slow contest between a written ruling and a built environment. The award is portable: it travels in diplomatic notes, in court filings, in the speeches of foreign ministers who want to remind their audiences that international law is more than an aspiration. The islands Beijing has constructed do not travel at all. They sit where they were placed, with runways long enough to host combat aircraft and harbours deep enough to service a permanent coast guard squadron. A court ruling tells you what the law says a feature is. A ten-year-old runway tells you what kind of force can be projected from it on any given Tuesday.

This is the pattern that defines a particular kind of regional contest in the second half of the 2020s. Where the global order once assumed that legal process would, in time, convert into accepted facts, a number of regional actors are now betting on the opposite sequence — that accepted facts on the ground will, in time, render legal process academic. Beijing is the most consequential practitioner of that sequence, but it is not the only one. The broader question — for ASEAN, for Japan, for Australia, for the United States under whichever administration is in office — is whether the international legal architecture built between 1945 and 2016 can survive a sustained test in which one of its principal parties treats the architecture as advisory.

Manila’s position in that contest is harder than it looks on a map. It has a legal win it can cite and a constellation of treaty partners prepared to cite it with it. It does not have the maritime mass to translate citation into presence on its own. It has, in the words of its own counsel, watched a decade erode the practical reach of a victory that, on paper, was total.

What remains contested

The sources do not agree on how to weight the moment. Chinese messaging presents the Philippines as the obstacle to regional stability, a claimant that has chosen litigation over diplomacy and is now discovering the limits of that choice. Filipino commentary, including from the lead counsel himself, presents a harder truth: that the ruling remains a legal fact in the international system, even as the water around it has been quietly rewritten.

What neither side disputes is the underlying arithmetic. A tribunal award has now been on the record for ten years. China has built and operated at least seven artificial islands in the period since. No party has fired a shot over the dispute in that decade, and no party is expected to. The contest is being conducted in cubic metres of concrete, in patrol hours, in domestic legislation and in the slow patient work of making one set of facts on the water feel inevitable and another feel archival.

That is what the People’s Daily editorial, on this anniversary, is designed to communicate. Whether it is read as triumphalism or as the continuing insistence of a state that knows the legal ground beneath it has not stopped shifting is itself part of the message.

Desk note: Monexus treats the 2016 arbitration as a continuing legal fact, not a closed historical episode. We have reported the People’s Daily line at the weight of a primary diplomatic statement, and Manila’s own counsel’s concession at the weight of an authoritative concession. Where Western wires have tended to frame the award as simply binding and Beijing’s behaviour as defiance, the record on the water requires a more careful accounting — one we have tried to provide here.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/NikkeiAsia
• https://t.me/nikkeiasia