China Cracks Down on Politically Incorrect Maps

Reason 5,237 why doing buisnees with China is a bad idea.

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

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3645784#up_3645845

[2] 958 days ago, comments to submission "Google changes Palestinian location from 'Territories' to 'Palestine' from the BBC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651456#up_5651804

[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-maps-idUSKBN0TZ1AR20...

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.

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.