China destroys 30k ‘incorrect’ world maps, claims Indian terrority | Hacker News Reader

China destroys 30k ‘incorrect’ world maps, claims Indian terrority

thehindu.com

76 pointsycombonator15 comments

Anyone who has worked on mapping software knows that China has all these special rules you have to abide by if you want to sell there. You basically end up with two separate products: one for China and one for the rest of the world. It’s not just that you need to show borders a certain way, but also you need to exaggerate the size of certain islands and show some things where they don’t actually exist. They even use a different coordinate system so if you get latitude and longitude from a GPS you cannot plot them on a Chinese map without applying a mathematical transformation To the coordinates beforehand. Lots of special case code and parallel data!

Politics is one thing, but that's astonishing that they require lying about geological fact. Exaggerating the shape of islands can actually kill people, if they're trying to navigate the ocean with those maps.

In fairness every country uses local coordinate reference systems so transforming between those coordinates and lat/lon is a totally normal thing to do.

Wild. Any idea why?

No clue—I just wrote the code. If I had to guess, CN probably justifies it as a national security thing.

If you want to learn more there seems to be a Wikipedia article [1] that mentions some of the rules and the coordinate system.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...

> Almost 30,000 “incorrect” world maps, showing Taiwan as a separate country and wrong depiction of the Sino-Indian border, were destroyed by the customs authorities in Qingdao, it said.

> “What China did in the map market was absolutely legitimate and necessary, because sovereignty and territorial integrity are the most important things to a country. Both Taiwan and South Tibet are parts of China’s territory which is sacred and inviolable based on the international law,” Liu Wenzong, professor from the department of International Law of China Foreign Affairs University said.

They are touchy about their maps for sure. If you want to get kicked out of the country, just make it known you own a map like these at your workplace. Deportation will not be far off.

> showing Taiwan as a separate country

Fun fact: the government of Taiwan would also object to these maps. Both the RoC and the PRoC claim that all of China (mainland + the island of Taiwan) is actually one country, but disagree on who's rightfully in charge of it. This is also what both governments use to justify allowing civilian travel between them, with a polite legal fiction along the lines of 'that's still China over there so you can go there, even though that territory is controlled by those people we don't like'.

> Fun fact: the government of Taiwan would also object to these maps. Both the RoC and the PRoC claim that all of China (mainland + the island of Taiwan) is actually one country, but disagree on who's rightfully in charge of it.

Another fun fact: the RoC would probably give up its claim to Mainland China if it could, but it can't because the PRC would interpret that as a declaration of independence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan#Pos...

What is the point of displaying the point of view of a scholar from China (from International Law of China Foreign Affairs University), and omitting to offer views from scholars of the other affected territories?

Note that India is similarly picky about maps concerning territory it doesn't control, though admittedly, it's happy with censoring maps or having people print disclaimers, and doesn't destroy them completely.

Economist maps showing the India/Pakistan/China boundaries in Kashmir are regularly censored.

Any country which claims land needs to never give up its claim as a bargaining chip. India and China just go to extremes over it including privately produced content.

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