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One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to so

One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one.

MichaelBurge 5y ago
It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind. China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that nobody cares about, yet the USA is a strong superpower nonetheless.
- anovikov 5y ago
  Because China is a dictatorship, it is OK to be seen as a single coherent entity, in my opinion.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    Just as in any large political system, China cannot be entirely controlled centrally. There are three or four levels of regional and local control below the centre. It would be impossible for Beijing to administer all of that detail. In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right. For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim. All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.
    - surge 5y ago
      >For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim. Your social credit score will go down if you do.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. That's not how the CCP works.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.
  - rfoo 5y ago
    As a Chinese I don't need to open maps or search how large the island is, I learn that it is a tiny one from (printed) newspapers years ago. OTOH I don't have much confidence in the middle manager theory, either.
- ngc248 5y ago
  China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.
  - necovek 5y ago
    In a single party system, one entity as large as CCP can never be "coherent": you'll always have people pulling in different directions.
    - ngc248 5y ago
      Agree ... there are always factions etc and all these factions may manifest power within china, but external to China, CCP at projects a coherent facade unlike other democracies.
      - prewett 5y ago
        China is not a democracy
        necovek 5y ago
        Even political scientists disagree what makes a "democracy" today. I am pretty sure China considers itself a "democracy" in the original meaning of the word: "rule of the people" (thus the focus on "People" in "People's Republic of China" and in many other official names). Basically, anyone can rise to power by going through the ranks of the communist party, and people are elected and voted for. I wouldn't consider it a democracy even in that basic sense because of the disregard for basic human rights and freedoms, and it surely is not one in the modern political sense of multi-party systems. Similarly, one could argue that the de-facto two-party system in the USA is not very democratic either, as it's not unlike a single-party system in China: you go through the ranks of the *party* to progress. It's the other things that make USA more of a democracy (freedom of speech and protections against unsubstantiated persecution, for example, and sure, ability to start a party too — even if it's inconsequential).
- Grustaf 5y ago
  If any country can be treated as a coherent entity, it's China.
kergonath 5y ago
I am not disagreeing at all, but most places have stupid regulations for petty nationalistic reasons. Saying that you can’t have a superpower with these is laughable, considering the history of the USSR and the US specifically. Though, again, this is very common.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
You should see the Gerrymandering maps in the US. It’s map distortion for political power, not just political posture.
- aivisol 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? I am curious to know more about it.
  - mynameismon 5y ago
    Perhaps the most egerious example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois's_4th_congressional_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois's_4th_congressional_d...
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    Some US voting districts are very odd shapes, specifically to include/exclude factors which increase the chances of a particular political party winning.
    - zrail 5y ago
      Not to completely defend gerrymandering but districts are also drawn "oddly" to help ensure minority representation within a system with absurd constraints. If there were more representatives districts would be more granular and localized but because representatives are capped at 435 you have this bizarre situation of needing to give opportunities for equal representation across populations that are spread across a city/county/state.
      - MiddleEndian 5y ago
        If someone appointed me as the czar of legislative voting, my way to resolve this and reduce the incentives to gerrymander while improving minority representation would be to replace single district voting with a vote-point system. If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others. To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes. This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.
Hoasi 5y ago
> You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one. You absolutely can and must. That is, in fact, one of the prerogatives of a superpower.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  What is even the purpose of showing these tiny islands in a larger size? It's not like they are the backbone of China's economy or that they prove that the party still has the mandate of heaven.
  - lolive 5y ago
    To oversize the problem related to those islands. And make the people agree upon a common ennemy. [USA did a similar oversizing trick with WMD and the belief that Irak was the 4th biggest army in the world] [calm down, USA patriots, all the countries do use the same tricks.]
    - dr-detroit 5y ago
      the difference is we had the worlds largest protests over that iraq war but still the Rupert Murdoch's media machine spit on us and stabbed us in the back and did 2 wars anyway and now they blame mr meme man sleepy joe for it all.
    - ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
      Did Iraq NOT have the 4th biggest army in the world?
      - lolive 5y ago
        In the 80s yes.
      - tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
        It's not the size, it's how you use it.
2wrist 5y ago
If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are. It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  > If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are. A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades. China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5". Not at all comparable.
    - Eelongate 5y ago
      > Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades. Can you provide information or citations for this? > China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5". That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
- bmn__ 5y ago
  I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see <https://explainxkcd.com/977 https://explainxkcd.com/977> for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
zczc 5y ago
"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?" — George Orwell, 1984
- lolive 5y ago
  All that thread was screaming for that quote. Thank you forever for posting it!
Dah00n 5y ago
AFAICT it is not "distorting SIZES". It is at which zoom level an area or island becomes visible. > It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. Eh, the USSR was made bigger on maps for decades because of US "4-year-old level lies". This is not even in the same ballpark.
Siira 5y ago
It’s not “4-year-old level” if you have the power to back it up. Anyone who hasn’t heard of the trick will be deceived by it, which I suspect will be the majority of people.

MichaelBurge 5y ago

It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind. China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that nobody cares about, yet the USA is a strong superpower nonetheless.

anovikov 5y ago
Because China is a dictatorship, it is OK to be seen as a single coherent entity, in my opinion.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  Just as in any large political system, China cannot be entirely controlled centrally. There are three or four levels of regional and local control below the centre. It would be impossible for Beijing to administer all of that detail. In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right. For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim. All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.
  - surge 5y ago
    >For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim. Your social credit score will go down if you do.
redis_mlc 5y ago
> That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. That's not how the CCP works.
gostsamo 5y ago
This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.
- rfoo 5y ago
  As a Chinese I don't need to open maps or search how large the island is, I learn that it is a tiny one from (printed) newspapers years ago. OTOH I don't have much confidence in the middle manager theory, either.
ngc248 5y ago
China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.
- necovek 5y ago
  In a single party system, one entity as large as CCP can never be "coherent": you'll always have people pulling in different directions.
  - ngc248 5y ago
    Agree ... there are always factions etc and all these factions may manifest power within china, but external to China, CCP at projects a coherent facade unlike other democracies.
    - prewett 5y ago
      China is not a democracy
      - necovek 5y ago
        Even political scientists disagree what makes a "democracy" today. I am pretty sure China considers itself a "democracy" in the original meaning of the word: "rule of the people" (thus the focus on "People" in "People's Republic of China" and in many other official names). Basically, anyone can rise to power by going through the ranks of the communist party, and people are elected and voted for. I wouldn't consider it a democracy even in that basic sense because of the disregard for basic human rights and freedoms, and it surely is not one in the modern political sense of multi-party systems. Similarly, one could argue that the de-facto two-party system in the USA is not very democratic either, as it's not unlike a single-party system in China: you go through the ranks of the *party* to progress. It's the other things that make USA more of a democracy (freedom of speech and protections against unsubstantiated persecution, for example, and sure, ability to start a party too — even if it's inconsequential).
Grustaf 5y ago
If any country can be treated as a coherent entity, it's China.

kergonath 5y ago

I am not disagreeing at all, but most places have stupid regulations for petty nationalistic reasons. Saying that you can’t have a superpower with these is laughable, considering the history of the USSR and the US specifically. Though, again, this is very common.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

You should see the Gerrymandering maps in the US. It’s map distortion for political power, not just political posture.

aivisol 5y ago
Can you elaborate on this? I am curious to know more about it.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  Perhaps the most egerious example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois's_4th_congressional_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois's_4th_congressional_d...
- ctdonath 5y ago
  Some US voting districts are very odd shapes, specifically to include/exclude factors which increase the chances of a particular political party winning.
  - zrail 5y ago
    Not to completely defend gerrymandering but districts are also drawn "oddly" to help ensure minority representation within a system with absurd constraints. If there were more representatives districts would be more granular and localized but because representatives are capped at 435 you have this bizarre situation of needing to give opportunities for equal representation across populations that are spread across a city/county/state.
    - MiddleEndian 5y ago
      If someone appointed me as the czar of legislative voting, my way to resolve this and reduce the incentives to gerrymander while improving minority representation would be to replace single district voting with a vote-point system. If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others. To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes. This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.

Hoasi 5y ago

> You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one. You absolutely can and must. That is, in fact, one of the prerogatives of a superpower.

Grustaf 5y ago
What is even the purpose of showing these tiny islands in a larger size? It's not like they are the backbone of China's economy or that they prove that the party still has the mandate of heaven.
- lolive 5y ago
  To oversize the problem related to those islands. And make the people agree upon a common ennemy. [USA did a similar oversizing trick with WMD and the belief that Irak was the 4th biggest army in the world] [calm down, USA patriots, all the countries do use the same tricks.]
  - dr-detroit 5y ago
    the difference is we had the worlds largest protests over that iraq war but still the Rupert Murdoch's media machine spit on us and stabbed us in the back and did 2 wars anyway and now they blame mr meme man sleepy joe for it all.
  - ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
    Did Iraq NOT have the 4th biggest army in the world?
    - lolive 5y ago
      In the 80s yes.
    - tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
      It's not the size, it's how you use it.

2wrist 5y ago

If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are. It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.

Eelongate 5y ago
> If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are. A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades. China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5". Not at all comparable.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    > Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades. Can you provide information or citations for this? > China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5". That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
bmn__ 5y ago
I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see <https://explainxkcd.com/977 https://explainxkcd.com/977> for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.

zczc 5y ago

"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?" — George Orwell, 1984

lolive 5y ago
All that thread was screaming for that quote. Thank you forever for posting it!

Dah00n 5y ago

AFAICT it is not "distorting SIZES". It is at which zoom level an area or island becomes visible. > It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. Eh, the USSR was made bigger on maps for decades because of US "4-year-old level lies". This is not even in the same ballpark.

Siira 5y ago

It’s not “4-year-old level” if you have the power to back it up. Anyone who hasn’t heard of the trick will be deceived by it, which I suspect will be the majority of people.