If Beijing rattles its humongous saber, should we all cower in fear and immediately say we?re sorry? Or should we, who call ourselves a sovereign nation, soberly and firmly point out that we have no intention of going to war with our giant neighbor simply because we have decided to meet a United Nations directive to set our own territorial limits and to stake our long-standing claims before the world?

China?s quick and antagonistic reaction to the passage by the Philippine Congress of a baselines bill this week speaks volumes about how the so-called ?Asian superpower? regards its smaller, weaker and less well-off neighbors. At the same time, Beijing?s official denouncements of the proposed law show the lack of respect of the Chinese for the UN, which had set the deadline for the passage of baselines legislation by all archipelagic countries, including the Philippines, by May of this year.

Immediately after the congressional bicameral committee approved the bill that called the Scarborough Shoal and the Kalayaan island group part of the Philippines? ?regime of islands,? Beijing?s top officials and its state-controlled media went into overdrive, insisting that China had sole ownership of what we call the Spratly Island Group. The Chinese also summoned the Philippine ambassador to explain this supposed affront to China?s sovereignty.

But the bully-boy tactics of Beijing towards a small neighbor that is only making official a long-time territorial claim?without definitively doing so, it must be noted?obscure the genesis of the proposed baselines law, which is a UN directive that seeks precisely to peacefully resolve competing claims of nations over disputed lands and waters like those that lie west of Palawan. In accordance with the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the worldwide organization of nations set a May 13, 2009 deadline for archipelagic states to pass baselines laws that define maritime boundaries and historic borders and to submit these to the UN.

The UN will then set up the International Seabed Authority, an international body that will define country territories, including the extent of maritime jurisdiction, the measure of continental shelves, zones of economic development, areas of strategic importance for national security and areas subject to resource and environment management. While not really a hard-and-fast requirement, a baselines law will strengthen the Philippines? historic claim to the Spratlys, which are also being claimed by Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and Vietnam, apart from China.

Perhaps China never expected the Philippines to pass such a law. But then, perhaps our northern neighbor may have forgotten that our legislators would have gotten hell from their countrymen if they had not done so because they would thereby be abdicating a long-standing claim to a strategic sea lane and a potentially oil-rich resource.

And now that Congress did what the Chinese thought it couldn?t do, out of deference to or fear of Beijing, the latter seem perfectly ready to engage us in a territorial staredown. And, despite our penury, minuscule size and chronic lack of power, we?d be suicidal if we buckled under.

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No one, except the most publicity-hungry of our politicians languishing at the bottom of opinion polls, is calling out the Chinese and demanding a mano-a-mano over the Spratlys. On the contrary, what we want is for the Philippines, China and all the other claimants of the Spratlys to go before the UN and seek a peaceable resolution of territorial claims before a supposedly impartial body that the seabed authority was conceived to be.

In fact, the proposed baselines law, which becomes legal upon the signature of the President, doesn?t actually claim Kalayaan and Scarborough. Instead of making a definitive claim on these parts of the Spratlys, the proposed law merely includes these two areas in the Philippines? ?regime of islands,? as it is allowed to do so under UNCLOS.

Calling the two disputed areas ?a regime of islands under the Republic of the Philippines? provides Manila ?a safety valve to ensure that our claim will always be protected,? even if these two places lie outside the country?s territorial baselines under the proposed law, according to House foreign affairs committee chairman and Cebu Rep. Antonio Cuenco.

In fact, Environment Secretary Lito Atienza said the proposed law excludes the Kalayaan Group from the Philippines? territorial boundaries in the Spratlys precisely ?to spare the country from international conflict.? Atienza insisted that the exclusion does not mean the Philippines ?is abandoning its right to the area, since physical separation does not affect the sovereignty of states.?

The original House version of the bill declared the two disputed areas as part of Philippine territory, and it was only after much discussion that the congressmen agreed with the position of both Malaca?ang and the Senate that these should be placed outside the baselines. The compromise hammered out was that the two areas would be declared outside the lines but under the regime of islands.

But that was not conciliatory enough for the Chinese, apparently. In no uncertain terms, China announced that ?claims to territory sovereignty over Huangyan Island and the Nansha Islands [as Beijing calls them] by any other country are all illegal and invalid.?

The phrase ?any other country? seems to be the key. By slapping down even the slightest claims to the disputed areas, China is sending a signal not only to the Philippines but also to the other claimants that any compromise?and any reasoned resolution of the territorial conflict, it seems?is out of the question even before a dispute is brought before the UN.

The ball is now definitely back in the hands of the Philippines, which has got to make it case clear yet again to the Chinese and to the international and regional bodies that are in charge of resolving such disputes, without raising the hackles of the Party bosses who rule our rich, powerful and often belligerent neighbor. But China must also understand that it cannot unilaterally deny other countries? territorial and sovereign claims all the time without appearing before the rest of the world like a big, insensitive, war-mongering bully that the people in places like Taiwan and Tibet regularly claim it really is.