China: fines for bad maps

This is fascinating — In China, you can get fined if you make a map of China without Taiwan or other disputed territories. Reminds me of being confused trying to find the primary airline of China.

Based of vague recollections of its name, I searched Google for {{ china air }}. The first hit was for China Airlines. But the second hit was Air China. The first is the state carrier of the ROC (Taiwan), the second is the PRC (mainland China). Turns out my intended concept, “Official Chinese airline”, isn’t a coherent concept if your political worldview includes both the ROC and PRC as entities. But maybe what I should have wanted was just airlines that fly around East Asia and various parts of China; in that case, getting both airlines is the right thing to do. At least Google got them both at the top of the list.

(p.s. anyone know how to force blogger to *not* destructively resize your images? sigh)

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2 Responses to China: fines for bad maps

  1. Eric says:

    you’ve got it opposite–china airlines is taiwanese, and air china is mainland chinese.

  2. Brendan says:

    Fixed. Good thing no one will ever know my error until the end of time.