Back in the early 90's (in the US) I had a friend who was a college student from China. In the common area of her dorm there was a huge wall-size Rand-McNally map of the world. We were looking it over.
"There's China" I said. "And there's Taiwan."
"You know Taiwan is really not that big." she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Map makers show it larger than it really is in order to exaggerate its importance."
I was a little weirded out by that idea. This girl was pretty intelligent, she seemed to know some math and logical thinking. She was in the process of becoming a CPA.
For better or worse I responded with practical analysis: "How would that even work? You and I could go buy maps right now for navigating ships and airplanes, those would have to be accurate in order to function. We could compare them to this one and if they are noticeably different we could complain and the company that made the map would lose face. Why would Rand-McNally give a shit about the political importance of Taiwan anyway, enough to risk their own credibility?"
I went to the University of Washington, at which an extremely high percentage of the students were Chinese (I want to say between 30% and 40%). Taiwan and the South China Sea are definite hotbutton issues. Once during an international relations lecture of about 200 people, the professor made the mistake of mentioning Taiwan which caused one of the Chinese students to stand up and begin talking very loudly (shouting?) at the professor for what must have been a good three minutes, informing him that Taiwan is not the real China. It was pretty painful to watch considering he was one of the most senior professors within that department, and very well versed on the subject.
Then I also had a Chinese roommate freshman year and there were always oddities like "those people at Tiananmen had it coming." Lots of little things that added up over time.
So they (Asians, other) are at 21.5% in 2014/15. Note that international has its own separate slice, at 14.7%, that isn't broken down. So...that means all that 21.5% are American, possibly of Chinese descent, which is far away from Chinese nationals.
UW is a commuter school, I think 75% of the students live at home even. So if you were living on campus, your view of the demographics would be a bit skewed. Incidentally, in 2013, UW admitted a class of 6,255, 687 of which were Chinese, roughly 10%, which still isn't shabby:
What many of them do, including my former roommate, is to move over here during their sophomore or junior years of high school so they can achieve resident status in the state of Washington and get cheap college tuition. So going by those numbers you found, the true percentage is probably between 25% and 30%.
Something else is going on. Either they are on an F-1 visa, paying out-of-state rates, they are illegal (doubtful these days), or...they have green cards (or even have citizenship). You can't pay in-state tuition on a student visa. If they have green cards, they are technically immigrants (though still Chinese nationals, for sure), and are on the hook to pay taxes in the US on worldwide income. (other visas can get you resident status, but none are related to education, perhaps if they are really rich they could get investor visas...but then money would be the least of their problems).
It's a nice example of how powerful media exposure is. Think of the persons brain as polluted by an influence solely geared towards making their brain an extension of a political apparatus to the point where they can no longer tell reality and polluted input apart. It is very hard to maintain objectivity in todays media rich world.
You too probably have pollution like that in your head - and so do I - and just like this person we are unable to recognize it for what it is. Objectivity is very precious and extremely hard to find.
Just as there are different degrees of wrong (the Earth is flat vs. the Earth is a sphere), there are different degrees of propaganda and varying severity of political indoctrination.
Thanks. I feel like there should be a corollary to Godwin's Law: "If an online discussion mentions a problem in a non-US country, almost surely someone will point out that the US is not perfect, and is therefore just as bad as the other country."
Isn't it odd that a bigger landmass confers more importance to her? I guess by her reckoning Russia is the most important country in the world, followed by Canada?
They would be.. except Russia and Canada are shrunken on most world or US/Europe maps because of the distortion from the map projection. Yet another mapmakers conspiracy.
(everything else that's far from the map center is of course also affected this way)
Map making is hard. You can't transfer spherical world to a flat paper sheet/screen without distorting it in one way or another. There was an article not long ago here in HN about this problem:
I asked my Taiwanese friend about this and she said when she was a kid, Taiwanese maps would have a larger Taiwan compared to China. She said it was to make Taiwan seem more important.
I found someone else who claimed to have seen maps of this type, and had no reason to lie as far as I know. Especially since she is Taiwanese, and it made her own country look a little silly.
Well, I'm pretty sure it was a mercator projection, which would distort more-Northern mainland China even more larger relative to less-Northern Taiwan.
Another big thing with china is that they consider all maps and satellite pics to be state secrets that require strict approval before being published. If you ever look on google maps, the satellite pics dont match up up the maps pics. Most are off by at least 100 ft and that is because all the map data china releases has the coordinates randomly changed by a random amount in a random direction and it is different for every city. Baidu maps does not have this problem because they actual had people sit down and manually correct all the maps to match up with the satellite pics but the gps coordinates are still wrong so when you look on your phone you are rarely ever in the correct position on the map
The offsets are not random, but algorithmic, using the GCJ-02 datum. Of course, legal access to use the GCJ-02 algorithms requires that you kowtow to the Chinese government:
> It uses an encryption algorithm[13] which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security.
You're both right! It uses reversible randomness apparently. Wonder how hard the algorithm and seed(s) are to figure out
There are now many OSS-tools that convert between the global coordinate system standard (WGS-84) and the Chinese deliberately incompatible coordinate systems (GCJ-02 and BD-09).
It's worth mentioning here that maps inside China don't have this problem, Baidu Maps and Apple Maps (which uses Chinese map data when used in China) for example show accurate GPS position and correlation with satellite images.
It's presumably just typical government inertia at this point... Everyone using maps within China gets accurate maps so not worth the trouble of trying to change the policy.
Aha! Thanks for explaining at least a little bit why sometimes I see the map road not really on the actual road. But Google Maps has people too. And you'd think they'd take GPS coords to help match up? Though fwiw I was checking out some rather rural areas.
China takes this issue seriously because it has government censorship of many kinds of publications, and in international law, maps matter. (A map can indicate acquiescence to another country's territorial claim, so dictatorships that have territorial disputes with other countries censor maps.) There have been submissions to Hacker News about this issue before, and I have commented on those submissions from this standpoint of international law.[1][2] See also the Reuters news story "China tightens rules on maps amid territorial disputes"[3] (16 December 2015).
In countries that are not dictatorships, national officials may announce that they refuse to accept certain territorial claims, and simply make sure that officially published maps support the country's view of territorial claims. That can include a country publishing maps that say "boundary representations are not necessarily authoritative" when the country's government has no settled opinion on territorial disputes regarded by other countries. If you have access to maps published by a variety of official and nonofficial publishers, you can compare for yourself how different publishers treat the issue of territorial claims in the South China Sea (the example that is prominent in today's article) or in the border region of Nicaragua and Costa Rica (the earlier example cited below) or in Palestine (the later example cited below). You could also look up Kashmir on a lot of different maps and look for border details on those maps.
[1] 1387 days ago, comments to submission "The First Google Maps War" from the opinion page of the New York Times:
This so-called international law is often repeated online, with no evidence that random consumer maps have ever been used to resolve a dispute.
If official government maps shows a certain boundary it is evidence that the government at some point in time accepted that as fact (or pretended to accept it as fact).
Consumer maps are probably meaningless unless the government or local officials were using them and they had no official maps to contradict the unofficial consumer maps. I vaguely recall some embarrassment in India where officials were using unsanctioned maps (but I can't find a link).
As far as I can tell consumer maps (not used by officials) have never been used in an international court to prove a boundary. They can be, at worst, propaganda. There is not, as far as I can tell, any UN or other international treaty which mandate that any rabdom map is evidence of boundaries.
In the Shebaa farms dispute, for example, Israel and UN officials cited official Lebanese military maps as evidence [0].
tldr; It is enough for China to police official government maps and the use of maps by officials, without confiscating maps tourists bring in ... unless it's all about propaganda to support spurious claims, which of course it is.
Nowhere near this level, but India is pretty sensitive about maps too.
When entering the country the first "forbidden" item listed on the customs form isn't drugs or other illegal things, it's "Maps and literature where Indian external boundaries have been shown incorrectly".
Of course, I doubt they enforce that, especially since anyone with a phone who has opened Google/Bing/Apple Maps while in a different country probably has the "incorrect" boundaries cached on their phone when they enter.
(we have some border disputes with Pakistan and China)
Indeed. I studied in China for a year (in 2005) and I remember that amongst the recommendations for travelers, one was to avoid showing your travel guides - or at least the maps - as most would raise eyebrows. I remember covering Taiwan on the map with my hand a few times when asking other college students about recommendations for holiday travels, so they wouldn't pick up on it.
On the other hand, it's not like it was grounds for paranoia either: that was usually a good conversation starter on the train. There's a wide disconnect between what the government says it will enforce, what it actually enforces, and what people actually think.
You could get into some weird conversations, but I generally did not come across much animosity because of these maps. Awkwardness, at worst. If there was any, you'd simply back out and apologize for the map being inaccurate.
Were there any issues with people having/using openstreetmaps? I believe they're just ignoring the law and provide maps without the offset, but I haven't heard of china blocking access to the project.
Oh, they'll block it if it gets any sort of traction. Right now OpenStreetMap is probably not even worth the CPU cycles it takes to add it to the GFW blacklist.
Genuine question: how exactly would a foreign "internet company" "lobby the Chinese government?" Google literally had to take their ball and leave China at one point because China wouldn't compromise on a lot of things.
First of all, The Google case is a long story. It boils down to Google HQ, especially the three founders, didn't grant much power to local team. I remember there was a news report that one of Google China's partners was trying to lobby a chinese official by gifting gifting the latest iPad, Brin heard that and shutdown that operation completely. While I appreciate the moral high ground and respect FCPA laws, the problem is that other US companies and non-US companies, can and successfully exploited this chinese "culture" and influenced policy makers.
Secondly, for every hostile Chinese policy, there must be someone benefited. Local Chinese internet giants are actively exploiting every possible way to lobby policies for their own good. US capitals can deploy lobby operations via VIE.
Finally, the thing that troubles me is that after all these years, Google is making a coming back to China[1], I mean wtf? seriously? Many hardcore Google fans in China a disguised by this awful act.
And then hacking Google again to commit corporate espionage and steal U.S industrial secrets? (Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/security-experts-china...) Or any number of other attacks, backstabbing or a lack of cooperation from China's government?
Google left China because it just wasn't worth it to them to do business there anymore. Especially when your own research into the security breach shows the host country's government is facilitating the attacks on your company. I'd leave too... Then again, I wouldn't have been there in the first place.
> the attacks were "orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticising him personally
As soon as I went to the page, it was hijacked by a huge advertisement. It literally loaded the article, then it disappeared and a huge advertisement showed up.
If China "uses historical maps" like the one illustrated, to justify its claim, does that mean they think Hong Kong should still be a British Dependent Territory?
"There's China" I said. "And there's Taiwan."
"You know Taiwan is really not that big." she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Map makers show it larger than it really is in order to exaggerate its importance."
I was a little weirded out by that idea. This girl was pretty intelligent, she seemed to know some math and logical thinking. She was in the process of becoming a CPA.
For better or worse I responded with practical analysis: "How would that even work? You and I could go buy maps right now for navigating ships and airplanes, those would have to be accurate in order to function. We could compare them to this one and if they are noticeably different we could complain and the company that made the map would lose face. Why would Rand-McNally give a shit about the political importance of Taiwan anyway, enough to risk their own credibility?"
"They just do. All map makers do this."
She would not be convinced.