[paidleaf]

> China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see.

Everyone is aware of it. Maps have always been political. Maps and borders are political creations. Why is it that whenever a controversial topic comes up, people always bring up china? Every HN thread that has a controversial topic, someone always sneaks in a reference to china?

> "Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.

You act like there are two maps. One china is pushing and another everyone else agrees to. China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and every nation in ASEAN have their own maps.

The issue with maps has always existed. Whether it is current - crimea (russia/ukraine), sea of japan/east sea ( japan/korea ) or historical - hawaiians/inuit/nativesc vs european colonizers. Or the remnants of colonization like india/pakistan or artificial nations created by european colonizers in africa and the middle east which has created ethnic border issues.

Pretty much every nation today has map issues. Even within a nation there are map issues ( like the renaming of mount denali ).

[ryandrake]

It's not just borders. When you produce a map for the China market, you need to make certain islands prominent, and physically larger than they actually are, because South China Sea Politics. I can't find a link to cite, but this is well known among people in the mapping business.

Even their GPS coordinate system is different than the rest of the world. Most of the world has settled on WGS-84, but when you display GPS points on a map of China, you need to convert them to their own somewhat randomly-obfuscated coordinate system [1], and display all map data in that datum as well.

Because of these kind of special-snowflake rules, when you're making any kind of geographic software, you usually have to make two versions: One for China and one for everyone else. Not unlike dealing with the USA's insistence on using imperial measurement systems while most of the rest of the world has standardized on metric.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

[teh_klev]

> The issue with maps has always existed.

As an amusing aside, and whilst not wishing to introduce flammable politics into this discussion, there's a funny thing that goes on whenever the topic of the Scottish Independence debate arises in the media or on social media. It usually concerns the Scottish border between Scotland and England and usually heads along the lines of "rebuilding Hadrian's Wall" to keep us pesky Scots out of the rUK (or whatever the reason de-jour is) and is often repeated by unionists (and journalists) far south of the border who've likely never set foot in Scotland.

Little do they realise (or they do and are playing along with the usual lazy stereotypes and tropes about Scotland) that Hadrian's Wall doesn't track along the Scottish border and is in fact up to 70 miles south of the border (at the eastern end). So they unwittingly in their minds donated a decent chunk of the north east of England to Scotland come independence day. Well, thank you :)

So yes, people's ideas about maps and where borders lie are issues everywhere, not just in China.

[monadgonad]

> Little do they realise (or they do and are playing along with the usual lazy stereotypes and tropes about Scotland)

Why is it either of those? I think you're willfully taking "rebuild Hadrian's Wall" to have an extremely literal meaning that isn't intended by anyone saying it. Clearly they mean "build a wall between Scotland and rUK", not "follow the exact line of a 2000-year-old wall".

[teh_klev]

Trust me, if you've followed the Scottish Independence debate at all, there really are people who should know better that do actually think this way. They really do think Hadrian's Wall is the Scottish border.

[lobotryas]

>people always bring up China

Because China's often top of mind due to being in the news. Also, because China does many things (some good, many horrible) that suit them and not the West or Western principles. I'm curious to see why this bothers you and I hope you avoid falling into the "whattaboutism" trap.

Regarding parent comment: China's aggressive military base push in SCS and other waters is very worrying.

[dredmorbius]

I encountered a gentleman on G+ who argued most stridently that "the British Isles" was an absolutely unacceptible term for the large archipelago lying to the northeast of mainland Europe.

He is, it happens, Irish.

(His view is also poorly supported, and worse argued.)

[toss1]

NO.

China is NOT merely acting like anyone else in regards to international territories.

China very aggressively uses every social, political and military means to change the maps in their favor and extend their political control. This ranges from building military bases by expanding islands in international waters and putting air bases on it and threatening others, to denying that they invaded Tibet, to getting foreigners fired for liking a tweet that might hint that Taiwan is independent.

The US regularly needs to put naval vessels & aircraft in harm's way to frequently reassert Freedom Of Navigation in international waters -- the potential harm is from China's false assertion that these are Chinese territorial waters. This needs to be done ONLY against China in this region -- no other players try to pull the same nonsense.

Please stop trying to act as if China is not an outlier in this regard. Their egregious and even bellicose behavior needs to be called out and halted before it gets more violent. This only serves to normalize and encourage China's egregious behavior.

[dang]

Please don't take HN discussions into nationalistic flamewar. As the guidelines say, "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

(They also ask you not to use allcaps for emphasis, since that's basically yelling.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[knockingat3am]

And like clockwork, China isn't even singled out, isn't mentioned first, but instantly it's pointed out how there's really nothing particularly bad going on there, for over half a century. Even bending so far to pretend this is a "controversial subject", and as if most controversial subjects didn't mention China at all. The latter is an easily demonstrable falsehood, uttered in the interest of discussion hygiene. You can't make that shit up -- but I'm sure someone could crawl and visualize it one day. Though I guess one could simply read archives from the 1930s and get the same in more better language.

Other nations may have map issues, but China, in addition to concentration camps, really has map issues.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2128124/marr...

> As for the Marriott employee who “liked” the Twitter post by Friends of Tibet, Smith said disciplinary proceedings had been started. “Due to the mistake of an individual employee, our official [Twitter] account wrongly ‘liked’ the tweet supporting Tibet independence and misled the public. [We] have now suspended this employee and dismissal proceedings are under way,” he was quoted as saying.

Well, except that's not what happened. I couldn't find the one that was originally posted on HN, that article was much better, but this one has the tweet in question:

http://www.hoteliermiddleeast.com/33151-marriott-employee-fi...

He didn't make an "error" even. He liked a positive tweet that thanked them for something he didn't understand and had no instructions about. Off with his head, and everybody do the pre-emptive obedience dance, go! When something like this walks the planet, when something like this feeds, then it's not the worst idea to mention it or things related in spirit to it at every occasion, especially whenever you meet new people or new crowds, as a litmus test.

Just like you might have a dinner party in the early 1930s and, then you mention Nazi violence, and a guest mentions that people have just different ideas about how to best go about internal politics. You smile, thank them for their comment, and never invite them again. You don't "leave politics out" when concerned with serious things, unless you're either putting all your stakes on the Nazis winning and erasing all records, like they would have done in Eastern Europe had they not lost the war, or simply aren't thinking that far. As I said, many historical archives are testament to that kinda being the norm, but culture of the present and last half century, uncountable movies and speeches, kind of seem to suggest it's not the norm we end up thinking fondly of in hindsight. They're not the people we wish we had the courage to be. They're the ones we're ashamed of and euphemize, instead of just mentioning their name and some kind of glow filling our hearts. Oh well.

[dang]

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[reaperducer]

And there's also this:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-25/us-airlines-give-in-to...

China insisting that non-Chinese companies remove "Taiwan" as a nation from their web sites.

Some complied fully. Others, like Apple, geolocate the censorship:

http://fortune.com/2018/07/11/apple-taiwan-iphone-bug/