If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.
Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.
There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)
Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.
The planet is populated everywhere, and you need to know who's in power pretty much everywhere you're going, or else you might have a bad time.
Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)
On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?
It's not clear what effect "removing borders from maps" has - if you are suggesting having no borders as in your original comment, or having them, but just removing them from maps.
In the latter case it would be massively inconvenient to not know where borders are, if there are visa issues. Plus, there isn't really an equivalence to "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border". The appearance of a single, otherwise anon individual, versus international agreement on where the borders are seem to be v. different things.
As such, interpreting as the former; "maps are concerned with the concept of an area" - they are as concerned with navigation as anything else, so include roads, and borders plus border stops. "I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen" no, but they usually name the country - I mention citizen from the perspective on how it impacts travel; presumably removing borders means there are no territories, and thus no countries; but a country is as much a collection of people (citizens) so both diminish, unless you maintain a territory-less concept of citizenship.
Not clear to me "Nothing of value is lost" - tell me how this would impact, say, Israel? or anywhere bordering Russia. Or are you only taking from the about specific cherry-picked locales?
The problem is closer to: "the presence of pictures on CVs is detrimental to someone due to outside bias", "the presence of borders on maps is detrimental to Yandex due to outside bias". Not quite the same mechanism, but similar in spirit.
> they are as concerned with navigation as anything else
All maps are concerned with an area, some with navigation. A map of the Moon is still interesting to some non-astronauts.
I concede, if you use a map for navigation, a concept of a national border is still relevant. But in other cases, given the variety of possible geographical data, it rarely is.
Schengen says hi.
Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.
Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.
More seriously, as much as I’d love to live in a different world, borders are not going anywhere.
“Major provocation from China.”
If this is a major provocation I’d hate to see what he considers something more substantive than a UI change.
China is extremely offended when that happens — and should be held to the same standard, regarding others.
What this definitely is not is a major provocation.
Yes, that's bad. Hence, "should be held to the same standard". You may reasonably disagree with that, but as it stands your implication is that the more bad things a country does, the less we should care.
I can’t say for sure this is that, but I can say for sure that there is tremendous political power in cartography and the simplest act of choosing the label levels for placenames. This move has been done countless times before so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s intentional.
The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.
Tell that to the Austrailians and now the Israelis, where China has sent a naval task force. China is building aircraft carriers like nobody's businesss for force remote projection, which is the one thing they're really good at. China has the same desire to project force as the US, they simply lack the means to do so as effectively. Their recent actions in the Gulf is proof enough of that.