One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one.
"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?" — George Orwell, 1984
What is even the purpose of showing these tiny islands in a larger size? It's not like they are the backbone of China's economy or that they prove that the party still has the mandate of heaven.
There used to be an awesome online game where your challenge was to gerrymander constituencies. I had great fun and it was amazingly education. God knows what it was made in, possibly a Java Applet. I wonder if anything exists with modern tech.
Some US voting districts are very odd shapes, specifically to include/exclude factors which increase the chances of a particular political party winning.
Not to completely defend gerrymandering but districts are also drawn "oddly" to help ensure minority representation within a system with absurd constraints. If there were more representatives districts would be more granular and localized but because representatives are capped at 435 you have this bizarre situation of needing to give opportunities for equal representation across populations that are spread across a city/county/state.
If someone appointed me as the czar of legislative voting, my way to resolve this and reduce the incentives to gerrymander while improving minority representation would be to replace single district voting with a vote-point system.
If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others.
To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes.
This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.
So... proportional representation? I think without PR you don't really have a full democracy. Things might be "democratic" in spirit, but it's never a fair and transparent democracy without PR.
I am not disagreeing at all, but most places have stupid regulations for petty nationalistic reasons. Saying that you can’t have a superpower with these is laughable, considering the history of the USSR and the US specifically. Though, again, this is very common.
> If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are.
A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
> Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades.
Can you provide information or citations for this?
> China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5".
That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see <https://explainxkcd.com/977> for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
> But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
It’s not “4-year-old level” if you have the power to back it up. Anyone who hasn’t heard of the trick will be deceived by it, which I suspect will be the majority of people.
It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind.
China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion.
Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that nobody cares about, yet the USA is a strong superpower nonetheless.
This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.
Just as in any large political system, China cannot be entirely controlled centrally. There are three or four levels of regional and local control below the centre.
It would be impossible for Beijing to administer all of that detail.
In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right.
For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.
All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.
>For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.
China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.
Agree ... there are always factions etc and all these factions may manifest power within china, but external to China, CCP at projects a coherent facade unlike other democracies.
Even political scientists disagree what makes a "democracy" today.
I am pretty sure China considers itself a "democracy" in the original meaning of the word: "rule of the people" (thus the focus on "People" in "People's Republic of China" and in many other official names). Basically, anyone can rise to power by going through the ranks of the communist party, and people are elected and voted for.
I wouldn't consider it a democracy even in that basic sense because of the disregard for basic human rights and freedoms, and it surely is not one in the modern political sense of multi-party systems.
Similarly, one could argue that the de-facto two-party system in the USA is not very democratic either, as it's not unlike a single-party system in China: you go through the ranks of the *party* to progress. It's the other things that make USA more of a democracy (freedom of speech and protections against unsubstantiated persecution, for example, and sure, ability to start a party too — even if it's inconsequential).
The same exists elsewhere, in South Korea that I know of. Bridges and dams disappear or move on maps, Google Maps doesn't have high res sat pictures, etc. Just to say, it's not great IMO but not only totalitarian states have a need for such obfuscation; healthy democracies too.
> Bridges and dams disappear or move on maps, Google Maps doesn't have high res sat pictures, etc.
Not defending what I see as childish China the slightest, but one should be aware that even the best democracies don't necessarily publish entirely correct maps, and it is on purpose ;-)
If you can get perfect coordinates from Apple Maps and your missiles have GPS, you're good to boom. It's not as though the missiles have an iPhone inside them.
I don't think that follows. GPS access is universal; accurate mapping data is not. These rules are an attempt to ensure that precise coordinates for key targets are not available to anyone with a satnav system or smartphone.
To add, India has a similar law for maps. Any company serving maps in India has to show, for example, all of Kashmir - including the ones we aren't in control of - as belonging to India. I've made a small hobby out of noting websites which should be illegal in India because of that. A recent memorable incident (not a website, and not found by me) was when John Oliver's Last Week Tonight did a show on Asian-Americans and the Indian streaming service that hosted LWT had to crop the map out. It's pretty funny.
Ownership disputes exist in many places across the world. But making an island appear larger than it is, is a unique demand that reminds me of Indiana trying to pass a law that declared the value of pi to be equal to 3.
Projections were chosen for a variety of reasons. For example the Mercator projection distorts the size of things far from the equator, but it does preserve local bearing and shape.
Just do a Google search for the kinds of maps the some American schools use, you'll be amazed. Once, my wife had to hear from a university geography professor in America that Texas was larger than Brazil. When contested the professor said he was pretty sure.
I'm not supporting China territorial claims, but I don't expect anything different from their government. I did however expected better from the U.S.
I think you're assuming they are not available because they pushed back on the one specific thing about island size and not something else all together. It's not really proven that they are not available because they have that much integrity.
Google did actually make a stand here a decade back, and have been blocked ever since. The last straw for them at the time, however, wasn't political pressure to make some islands look bigger or censor some websites, but espionage.
No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.
It’s not true though. They were under tremendous pressure to adapt their product and change it for the ccp (with censorship for example). They were constantly resisting by introducing workarounds. Until the espionnage thing when they said "fuck it, we’re done". I remember very well: I was living in China at the time.
Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.
Google had been running search in China up till 2010, and it has been censoring its results according to Chinese government wishes. Then, Google found out that China has been hacking them, got angry and left.
Leaky censoring, you could still find the banned stuff. Sergey Brin was very anti-authoritarian given his background, and Google's decision to leave China was far more principled than "we have no choice". They were given a choice to comply with onerous government restrictions and decided to say no.
(And yes, the "old" Google of the Brin area is gone. I also don't think Steve Jobs would kowtow to the CCP and compromise Apple like Cook is doing. The post 2010-era is now run on bean-counter ethics)
Yes, you’re totally right. When I was growing up in 2000s, Google was the epitome of cool, and I dreamed of working there. Then, when I worked there in mid-to-late 2010s, it was not at all what it had been before.
They still maintain a rather large office in the university neighbourhood in Beijing. They even moved to bigger one few years back and there was a fire [0]. In Andrew Blum’s book Google is quotes to even “have left a couple of boxes there”, referring to network equipment. They have not really ‘left’.
We should not give Google a pass on this. Google does whatever the US Government wants, and lately the US Government has a far worse humanitarian track record than the Chinese government (when you consider all the civilian death and suffering in the middle east over the past few decades).
Google also has an entirely different business model than Apple. You could say they would be in direct competition to the CCP so I don't think this is a reason to hold Google up for their "principles".
