China's ruler are now attempting to impose their world view on online maps services like Google maps by insisting that they depict China's borders 'correctly', as well as checking to see if locations that the government would rather keep secret can be viewed. No doubt they'll get their way and Google and the others will have to provide a different set of maps for their Chinese users, leading to the inevitable situation where Chinese folk go overseas and suddenly discover that our maps 'lie'.
I am reminded of how up until 2003, Chinese maps still showed Sikkim as an independent state - I had in fact never heard of Sikkim until I saw it on a Chinese map. This grotesque spectacle of a dictatorship insisting on the continued independence of a state which had been voted out of existence by its own people thirty years before was thankfully ended when, in 2003, China finally recognised the annexation of Sikkim by India in an apparent exchange for India's recognition of Tibet as an integral part of China.
The same insistance on controlling reality is displayed in this instance - no doubt in future all un-blocked online maps will show Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands as being the indisputable parts of China that the Chinese people have always known them to be - with no indication that there is even any conflict as to their ownership. However, re-drawing lines on a map will not make them so.
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5 comments:
That's not controlling reality. That's pretending to control reality.
What is reality except what we see? If y'all want to get philosophical about it that is.
What's "reality", FOARP? Some maps published in the west don't even show Aksai Chin as a disputed area, they simply show it as part of India.
What's "reality", pffefer? Some maps published in the west even show Aksai Chin as a disputed area, rather than simply show it as a part of India.
@Pfeffer - I don't take a position on these disputes - they are entirely a matter of China's relations with its neighbours, but isn't there something disturbing about governments which force all maps viewable in their country to subscribe to their version of things?
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