In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag | Hacker News Reader

In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag

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122 pointsmiles52 comments

Turns out this has been going on for some time:

Can't see this emoji (Taiwanese Flag) on macOS https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-th...

You can’t use the Taiwan flag emoji on a Chinese iPhone https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on...

Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

People with out of date versions of OSX may now be subjected to more scrutiny. Apple may have made an undocumented decision (or introduced a bug) that could cause death.

> Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

Not completely unheard of...

https://emojipedia.org/pistol/

Doesn't really count as "breaking Unicode".

Perhaps China can give Taiwan the finger without "breaking unicode" by simply demanding that fonts including the Taiwanese flag use a glyph that reads "One China Policy".

Toy pistol is still a pistol, so everything's alright. You'd have to replace the glyph with something that can still be considered Taiwanese flag.

Frankly that's an abuse of language. If you were to say

> "In the UK, it is legal for children to buy pistols"

Everybody would call you nuts. If you then smirked and said that water pistols are pistols, they'd groan at you.

No, now that's an abuse of logic and intention. We're talking about symbolic pictograms here, not laws. Just as you can depict emoticons by using humans, robots, colorful blobs or martians, you can depict pistols as toys, futuristic laser blowers, steampunk machinery or wild west revolvers. It's a symbol and you're free to show it any way you want.

We're talking about language, not cars. It's no different than if all the emoticons for cars were modified to be RC cars with large antennas surrounded by lighting bolts to signify that they're receiving radio transmissions. An RC car "is a car" a hypothetical you might protest, but a toy car is not the same in substance as "a car" in much the same way that a toy pistol is not the same in substance as "a pistol." Perhaps one day moralizing tech companies might even take this seriously and revise fonts to denormalize personal car ownership for the noble cause of environmental protection. Is that ridiculous? No moreso I'd argue than depicting all handguns as squirt guns.

Depicting "car" emoji as a toy car would be perfectly fine and within the artistic license of font makers. Just as depicting a toy gun is.

Imagine if they decided to turn the LGBT rainbow icon into a couple of hands holding each other, not to enhance the meaning of the glyph, but to, you know, protect children from gay ideas and make it harder for people to communicate about LGBT issues. Is that fair play? To me it sounds like somewhere between how dictionaries used to censor naughty words and 1984's newspeak.

No, because couple of hands holding each other doesn't represent "Rainbow Flag" (combination of "Waving White Flag" and "Rainbow" glyphs) in any way, so that's a clear spec violation.

However, if they decided to show a "rainbow painted on a white flag" instead of "rainbow-colored flag", it would be well within the Unicode spec. Of course it would have additional meaning and you can disagree with such decision on other grounds (I probably would), but it still wouldn't be "breaking Unicode", just like toy gun as "pistol" or toy car as "car" isn't. Hell, you can even make a font where every single emoji is depicted by toy cars doing silly faces and carrying things around.

> a clear spec violation

This is the meat of it. You don't give a shit about the spec.

This is not "breaking Unicode". They're just using a different font.

(Not trying to pass moral/political judgment, but let's please get the facts straight.)

Noted.

Bad, but also ‘just’ an extension of ‘tweaking’ maps by changing country names and borders, something every map maker that wants to have global presence has to do.

For example, see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10... (found by googling “map borders change depending on location”)

> We are locked :( I will never buy any China model of any Apple product again.

I wonder if anyone else can see the cognitive dissonance of this half-assed Boycott...

It's not as bad as it looks – he clarifies the situation in later tweets:

"The region you choose on the setup assistant will stay unchanged untill [sic] you reinstall the OS. I saw users who bought the Chinese model set the initial region to elsewhere, thus 🇹🇼 is properly displayed on their Mac and the 10.14.4 upgrade won’t affect them."

"So again there's no hardware lock. It has nothing to do with T2 chips. The only thing that changed is the mechanism macOS use to detect regions. You are still in control of your China model Macbooks."

https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056

Non-mobile link: https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025

Who even thinks up this stuff? Why?

Yeah I get "to de legitimise the Taiwanese govt", 1984 Newspeak, etc. But people are going to convey the idea one way or another. Its just petty and pointless. I suppose you could say that about a lot of censorship, but this just takes it to an extra level.

what they didn't tell you is the fact that the current government in Taiwan also refuse to display this exact same flag.

I posted links in my reply this thread, don't get too shocked when you read the full story. The real question to be asked is why people always tell the censored version of the story in line with their political stands.

From what I can read (wikipedia) your links say the opposite. "The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan", "found in numerous government offices in Taiwan and is that which the President and Vice President face to take the oath of office".

So what is your political 'stand' in this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Chin...

It's a bit like the efforts of the Iranian government to force people to use the term "Persian Gulf" rather than "Arabian Gulf." They passed a law in 2010 that was supposed to ban any international airline from Iranian airspace, if it referred to the body of water as the "Arabian Gulf" in its in-flight maps or other public displays.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-...

I don't think these are similar at all honestly

How so?

Because "Arabian Gulf", not "Persian Gulf" is the newspeak. Perhaps anti-Iranian bias (disturbingly common in the west these days) has colored your perception of this issue.

I’m a Persianist first and foremost, but I also spent time living in Oman, and it seems ludicrous to me that the legitimacy of the way that Gulf Arabs refer to the body of water bordering their countries (al-Khalīj al-‘Arabī, “the Arabian Gulf”) should be challenged. How could we possibly demand that one name or the other be used everywhere in the world?

From Wikipedia:

> The body of water is historically and internationally known as the "Persian Gulf". Some Arab governments refer to it as the "Arabian Gulf" or "The Gulf", but neither term is recognized internationally.

It’s only “petty” if you know about the censorship, which obviously is not what China intends to happen.

The people in 1984 weren’t talking about how petty it was that the party censored that news article the other day. They just literally never know about that news article.

I said 1984 newspeak. That isn't censorship per se. It's removing the vocabulary to express a dissenting opinion.

The Orwell comparisons may seem trite to you, but the fact is that if there's no available word for a thing, it becomes difficult for people at large to discuss it.

Some organisations conclude that if the masses can't name a thing, then it's impossible for anyone to think of it, and that this makes it go away. Personally I think this underestimates individual people's capacity to think up new names for things, and is therefore doomed to failure.

"Personally I think this underestimates individual people's capacity to think up new names for things, and is therefore doomed to failure"

Agreed, so I'm not sure why you're disagreeing?

I only mentioned it, to show I understand the wider context, so when I ask "why?" I don't get a load of "because censorship" answers. So not intended to come across as trite.

I'm not disagreeing :-)

Oh good, that was easy :)

Now lets solve Brexit! :ducks:

In this case the PRC is trying to combat something that might be seen as undermining the One-China Policy. Their argument would be that you don't have flags for other illegitimate governments so why have one for this illegitimate government?

Governments have to periodically kick up a fuss about these kind of things or it can be used to undermine their territorial claims, etc.

Similar stuff happens when companies start frivolous lawsuits about trademarks just so it can't be argued they aren't defending their trademarks.

Does the British government banning or allowing the IRA flag legitimise or delegitimise their presence in Northern Ireland? What about Spain and the Basque flag?

I would contend that the fact you feel you need to ban it, legitimises it.

Plus Taiwan's government is democratically elected, so if you go down the path of illegitimate governments, Chinas ruling party isn't looking so great there either.

I agree though, that probably is what they're trying to do. It just comes across as petty and pointless.

What is at play is not the existence of the flag, but its presence amongst that flags of Earth’s country.

The basque and IRA flags are not in your phone’s keyboard with every other nation. If they were it would absolutely be controversial.

Think of it like trademark protection. If a company does not vigorously protect their trademark, then they can lose it.

Well if mainland China sees Taiwan as a (temporarily lost) "province", why can't it have a flag? Don't other Chinese provinces not have a flag?

Ok let’s not forget that it’s also the flag of the Republic of China - so the other side of the revolution from the current government.

I was gonna say something like “what if a US state had the same flag as the UK or the CSA” but then I remembered Hawaii and Mississippi feature them :-)

No, Chinese provinces don't have flags. The SARs do; municipalities have theoretically not been allowed to have their own flags since 1997, but several are still using flags from before then and others have adopted flags since then.

Will Macs Sold in Taiwan have the reverse problem?

probably not.

After spending an extensive amount of time in Mainland China and Taiwan, it is fascinating to see how one country initially evolved in two separate countries based on different ideologies.

I would go as far as to say that if you want to see what communism and capitalism do to a country, those two are a perfect example.

The communism capitalism dichotomy masks a lot of subtlety, including: China’s market reforms, Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development, the relative sizes of the two countries, China interfering with Taiwan’s economy, etc

I say this because Taiwan isn’t doing as hot in economic development compared to China costal cities in recent years, but much of that comes from a myriad of other reasons besides “communism is better than capitalism”.

I agree with you completely, it is a simplistic example of course. But spending multiple weeks in each you can have a feel for the culture of each place, the way people behave, their level of education etc etc.

You agree with the parent completely, yet continue making exactly the same point you made before.

> "Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development,"

Not unlike South Korea, incidentally. A running series of military coups until quite recently.

Please do not confuse the above as praise for the DPRK, which like the PRC, operates concentration camps for political dissidents.

The title is misleading at best - the concerned flag is not Taiwanese flag, it is called the Flag of the Republic of China [1]. It is the flag refused to be displayed even by the current government of Republic of China, e.g. the government of Republic of China recently proposed to remove the exact same flag from its national ID card [2], the Republic of China government also refused to display this flag during its most recent national day celebration [3].

The flag used by those Pro-independence organizations[4], usually called the Taiwanese Flag, is vastly different and never got accepted by the mainstream to start with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China

[2] https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/

[3] https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry that you cited, and it begins, "The flag of the Republic of China is the national flag of Taiwan…"

edit: Is the technicality simply that the ROC flag was originally used on the mainland?

The Republic of China was founded in China but then they lost the war against the communists and fled to Taiwan. So that's why they kept on using the ROC flag there.

China doesn't recognise this flag since they consider that Taiwan is part of China. There's also a movement within Taiwan to change the flag but they probably won't do it because China would see that as a move towards independence, and could retaliate.

Nothing I can read supports your claims. To the contrary, wikipedia says:

> The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan. The hoisting and lowering of the flag are ceremoniously accompanied by the National Banner Song while those present stand at attention to give a standard salute with the right hand, held flat, to the right eyebrow. Schoolchildren have traditionally been required to attend morning rallies where the flag is raised after a rendition of the National Anthem of the Republic of China. Before martial law was lifted in 1987 in Taiwan, it was required that all vehicles be halted when passing by a flag ceremony.

"Republic of China" and "People's Republic of China" are different governments.

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