Chinese stay put in Panatag

China’s coast guard has prevented Filipino boats from fishing around the hotly contested Panatag or Scarborough Shoal, Philippine officials said yesterday, after Beijing kept a promise to ignore a court ruling voiding its vast South China Sea claims.

A dispute over the shoal, 124 nautical miles northwest of the Philippines mainland, was one of Manila’s main reasons for bringing international legal action against China in 2013.

Military officials and fishermen in northwest province of Pangasinan said Chinese coastguard vessels remained in place at Scar- borough and were still preventing fishermen from entering the shoal’s lagoon.

Many boats had stayed away until the situation was clearer, officials said.

“The fishermen here have a wait-and-see attitude and are feeling their pulse whether it is safe to go to Scarborough,” Luis Madarang, an official responsible for fishing in Infanta town, said by phone.

“We are not stopping them but cautioned them to stay away from any trouble in the area. It will not help the situation if they will challenge the Chinese who are still there.”

A local television crew joined a fishing boat to try to reach the Panatag Shoal in what a news anchor said was fishermen testing China’s compliance of the ruling on Thursday.

Footage from ABS-CBN News showed a handful of black-clad Chinese coastguard on a dinghy approaching the Filipino boat and using a megaphone to tell them to leave.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled on Tuesday that because it has rocks above high tide, Panatag was entitled to 12 miles of territorial sea.