221–230 of 275 posts
The US having a dedicated intelligence agency for maps seems to defeat most of the military value of this system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
Pretty insane for the writer or even China/Russia to believe the US, with all of its resources, wouldn't be able to make their own accurate maps.
> 1. Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction.
In other words, a senior party member's brother-in-law runs a civil engineering firm that, by pure coincidence, happens to offer a surveying service.
No one does regulatory capture better than a planned economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China isn't Marxist-Leninist - the CCP split from Marxist thinking and Comintern early in the PRC's history. It's become it's own thing because anything "communist" is just lip service at this point. Public veneration of past Chinese empires and dynasties is way more common than some idealized view of a proletariat state. Same with Vietnam (basically a crony capitalist country) and Laos (basically a buffer between Th…
You might want to edit Wikipedia's list of Marxist-Leninist states, in that case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Marxi... Also the page on China, which states the government is a "Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd be interested to see how that edit would be received by other editors of the page.
It's basing "Marxist-Leninist" on national constitutions, which themselves are de facto useless when the Politburos in China, Vietnam, and Laos make drastic policy changes every decade (eg. 10 years ago it was expected for Chinese Premiers to step down after a 10 year term). Also, that list doesn't seem to actually link sources to assertions.
The CCP's charter calls itself "Marxist-Leninist" but every single "thought"/ideology pushed by the CCP's leadership when a new Premier arises is de facto diametric to Marxism-Leninism, and it has always been this case since Mao.
I recommend reading "The Chinese Reassessment of Socialism, 1976–1992" by Yan Sun , "A Nation-state by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism" by Suisheng Zhao, and "China: Development and Governance" by Yongian Zheng and Gunwu Wang if you want to actually understand the ideological underpinnings of Chinese governance.
I have Chinese language sources as well I'd recommend but that's a whole other issue.
> I'd be interested to see how that edit would be received by other editors of the page
Just like they taught all of us from elementary school to college - Wikipedia IS NOT a reliable source.
Wikipedia should always be used to spark conversations, but it is up to you to actually use Primary and Secondary sources to validate whether content on Wikipedia is valid or not.
Wikipedia as an editorial organization has a lot of issues, internal rivalries, and astroturfing (especially w/ regards to highly controversial topics such as Asian politics).
As such, it's best to use Primary and credible Secondary sources.
Interesting. It is illegal in some western countries too to create your own maps. Another thing with maps is that online services have different maps depending on what country you access from.
Can you give an example of a western country that restricts map creation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, despite its apparent illegality, China seems to be fairly well-supported and well-mapped by OpenStreetMap, at least in major cities. And is entirely mapped in normal WGS-84 without the obfuscation problem. In any case, according to Wikipedia, open-source code is available to convert between WGS-84 and the obfuscated GJC-02 coordinates. Since technology seems to have caught up with it, is there any advantage (…
> is there any advantage (military or otherwise) for China to persist with obfuscation? Probably just China suffering from the same problem most of the world has, boomers that don't really understand technology running the government. > Is it just because of inertia that GJC-02 still exists? That could also be part of the problem, the 14 companies that currently provide all mapping services in China, and everyone who…
Back when the decision was made, most of the people running the government had studied engineering. A very common pattern in all industries in China are laws that ultimately lead to protectionism by forcing foreign companies to only work with local partners. This is exactly the consequence of this law. I'd be very surprised if that was not intended by law makers from the get go.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light It's often off by whole second or two. Disaster, I know! It'll also tell if it can you the ideal speed to drive to hit the next green light and join a "green wave".
I wish TomTom would get in on that.
> Its first two articles state why China is purposely obfuscating WGS-84 data, and in brief, they state that the law was formulated to: > 1. Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction. In other words, a senior party member's brother-in-law runs a civil engineering firm that, by pure coincidence, happens to offer a surveying service. No one does regulatory capture…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty insane for you to believe that a foreign country from afar could produce mapping data with the same degree of accuracy, detail and realtime freshness as a local provider on the ground. Of course there's military value in protecting mapping data from foreign adversaries, at the very least it adds a a time delay and some uncertainty to the data. It also probably makes it harder for some unsophisticated terrorist…
There's no need to speculate. Even with 1960s tech and no physical access, the US military somehow managed to produce really good maps of the USSR, superior to those that were available to the public. So ironically, the intentional inaccuracy of USSR-made maps affected domestic users the most. In 2024, with satellites producing imagery in ~10 cm resolution, the most important factor determining the quality of maps is…