By Karen Lema and Neil Jerome Morales
MANILA (Reuters) -&nbsp;Philippine&nbsp;President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Wednesday denied making an agreement with&nbsp;China&nbsp;to&nbsp;remove&nbsp;a&nbsp;grounded&nbsp;warship&nbsp;that serves as a military outpost in South&nbsp;China&nbsp;Sea, and said if there ever were such a deal, it should be considered rescinded.
The&nbsp;Philippines maintains a handful of troops aboard the World War Two-era Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal, known by Manila as Ayungin shoal, which is located inside its 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
China&nbsp;on Monday accused the&nbsp;Philippines of reneging on a&nbsp;promise&nbsp;made&nbsp;"explicitly" to&nbsp;remove&nbsp;the ship, which was&nbsp;grounded&nbsp;in 1999 to bolster its territorial claims in one of the world's most contested areas.
"I'm not aware of any such arrangement or agreement that the&nbsp;Philippines will&nbsp;remove&nbsp;from its own territory its ship," Marcos said in a video statement.
"And let me go further, if there does exist such an agreement, I rescind that agreement now".
Jonathan Malaya, National Security Council assistant director general, earlier challenged&nbsp;China&nbsp;to produce evidence of the&nbsp;promise.
"For all intents and purposes, it is a figment of their imagination," he said.
China's embassy in Manila said it had no comment.
China&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Philippines have been embroiled for years in on-off confrontations at the shoal, the latest on Saturday. The&nbsp;Philippines accused&nbsp;China's coast guard of using water cannon to impede a resupply mission to the Sierra Madre.
The&nbsp;Philippines was "committed to maintain" the rusty ship on the shoal, Malaya said, adding it was "our symbol of sovereignty in a shoal located in our EEZ".
An EEZ gives a country sovereign rights to fisheries and natural resources within 200 miles of its coast, but it does not denote sovereignty over that area.
The&nbsp;Philippines won an international arbitration award against&nbsp;China&nbsp;in 2016, after a tribunal said Beijing's sweeping claim to sovereignty over most of the South&nbsp;China&nbsp;Sea had no legal basis, including at the Second Thomas Shoal.
China&nbsp;has built militarised, manmade&nbsp;islands in the South&nbsp;China&nbsp;Sea and its claim of historic sovereignty overlaps with the EEZs of the&nbsp;Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.
Jay Batongbacal, a maritime expert at the University of the&nbsp;Philippines, said control of the Second Thomas Shoal was not only strategic for&nbsp;China&nbsp;but it could be "another ideal place to build a military base."
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(Reporting by Neil Jerome Morales and Karen Lema; Editing by Martin Petty)

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Philippine leader says no promise made to China to remove grounded warship