Catalonia is an autonomous community inside Spain, and still there's a catalan wikimedia foundation as far as I can see https://www.wikimedia.cat/
It seems to me this Wikimedia Foundation === Country Level Only Status is bullshit.
Yes, we catalans have another separate language besides spanish that grants for ourselves a whole encyclopedia in it (viquipedia. that's catalan wikipedia).
So I don't see why Wikimedia Taiwan should be an issue regardless of the status of Taiwan inside China itself?
And yes, the situations are 0 comparably in real life... just my random POV
Count your blessings. It gets a lot more confusing than that.
The Wikipedia community, the people that write stuff on Wikipedia wikis, isn't the same as Wikimedia, and the various different language Wikipedia communities even divide themselves up from one another. The Wikimedia Foundation, conversely, doesn't just provide the Wikipedia wikis, but it also provides wikis for projects like Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikisource. It even has its own wiki, the foundation wiki, not to be confused with "Meta", the wiki that I just pointed to. The Wikimedia Foundation also allows, as aforementioned, use of its name by chapters and thematic organizations.
And of course, "wiki" is not the abbreviation for "Wikipedia". It's a word for something else.
> Their last-minute objections claimed Wikimedia’s application was incomplete, and suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was carrying out political activities via the volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter
So seems China has a problem with that the Taiwan chapter is being used for political activism, rather than just serving/working on Wikipedia. Similarly if the Catalan chapter did activism in favor of independence, Spain might react to that in one way or another.
I don't know about the Catalan chapter, but the Catalan wikipedia itself leans towards Catalan nationalism.
For example, https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalunya describes Catalonia first and foremost as a "european country", while German wikipedia and most others describe it as a region/autonomous community in Spain.
Taiwanese official language is also mandarin, so it doesn't really make sense. Apart from the obvious Civil War issues, there is also another aspect to this: The CPC has done their very best to disemphasize the differences between "Han" Chinese, and discouraging the use of local languages like Shanghainese or Cantonese.
China is obsessed with unity and stability (with good historical reason), and very paranoid about foreigners trying to divide and conquer them (also with good reasons), and sometimes this takes on slightly ridiculous forms as in the wikimedia example.
Taiwan's language is traditional mandarin, which in the context of a text site like Wikipedia, matters a lot. Using China's site would mean being forced to read simplified Chinese. There's other language differences as well that would make a Taiwanese person very confused if they had to read a China-based Wikipedia. Really the only sensible solution is for Taiwan to have its own chapter.
Chapters are separate from which languages have a site. (E.g. thee exists Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia NYC, wikimedia cascadia etc. That is unrelated to there being an english language wikipedia)
Http://zh.wikipedia.org uses some weird auto conversion to try and be both lsnguages.
The most popular language in Taiwan is Mandarin, and they use the Traditional characters, but it’s the same Mandarin, albeit with small, regional differences like pronouncing 和 as hàn instead of Northern Chinese hé. Additionally, there are other official Taiwanese languages like Taiwan Min Nan and various Formosan languages.
Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine, but I wouldn’t want to see China have its claws on the only ZH-language Wikipedia either.
My view is rather different. Written Chinese does not "belong" to Mandarin or any other spoken Chinese language, but is its own entity.
While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese.
I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole.
My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour."
My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented.
Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound.
> I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
I strongly disagree. The simplified/traditional split is not the first time new character sets have been introduced. This has happened many times throughout the history of written Chinese. E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script. And yet this doesn't mean that our Classical Chinese works are all of a sudden written in a different language when written in modern standard script or Han Dynasty clerical script or even seal script (which in turn is definitely _not_ the original script that these works were written in).
Moreover the vast vast majority of differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters are one-to-one mappings between different characters. While simplified Chinese characters sometimes map multiple traditional Chinese characters to a single simplified one, the reverse direction also happens! See e.g. 乾 which is split into 干 and 乾 depending on meaning and pronunciation.
> Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese.
The fact that a single character can have different pronunciations and different meanings which can coincide or not among different varieties of Chinese has endured for as long as we've had written records of non-standard Chinese varieties. This is not something new with simplified characters.
At a higher level, there has been a split in Chinese between officially sanctioned characters and non-standard variant characters since the first unification of characters under the Qin dynasty (which characters are sanctioned has changed over time). Traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters are simply changes in which characters receive official sanction.
Basically at the end of the day the simplified/traditional split is nothing new in Chinese, it's happened many times before and it's very easy to learn one if one knows the other.
> E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script.
They're distinct in modern Chinese too, if you look closely.
Indeed it is! Although that's actually a later re-invention of modern fonts rather than a preservation of a continuous tradition and is not consistent because it cannot be since there are multiple potential ancestors of 月 (e.g. 朋, which does not preserve its seal script roots in any modern font I know of).
> Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine
This is absolutely not true. Even ignoring idiomatic differences (which are comparable to UK vs US English), the conversion from Traditional -> Simplified is a one-way function. The mapping between characters is not one-to-one: there are a bunch of traditional characters that map to the same simplified character, and some words that are dropped entirely. You can't up-convert from Simplified -> Traditional without guessing.
It's like saying we should just use simple.wikipedia.org for the English language and then use a thesaurus on the client side to auto-convert text to use big words for en.wikipedia.org. It ain't going to be readable.
Your analogy is not accurate. The Simple English Wikipedia is for ESL readers who are still learning English. The usage and grammar are different. A closer (but still imperfect) analogy is the "simplified" spelling of American English vs British where we dropped a lot of U's, or shortened "tonnes" to "tons."
The mapping is not isometric in either direction. There are simplified characters that collide when mapped to traditional and vice versa. In practice this isn't a problem though, because despite what many people think, each Chinese word is not necessarily one character. It is possible to use the context from surrounding characters to accurately map them back and forth. I'm sure it's not perfect, but for the general case it works. It's not a hypothetical either, Wikipedia does this currently.
It’s extremely far from perfect, and I know of no native speakers which use that automatic mapping. It’s like trying to read something through google translate: the point gets across, but the errors distract.
And it IS like the simple -> en example I gave, at times. Because there are more differences than just character usage. It also affects word choice and idioms. Even when the automatic translation picks the right character, it can still come off as... weird.
That’s why native speakers don’t use these features. It puts the text into an uncanny valley that is annoying to read.
Chinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org automatically transliterates into Mainland Simplified, Hong Kong Traditional, Macau Traditional, Malaysia Simplified, Singapore Simplified and Taiwan Traditional. The article text can be in any variant (and is usually a mixture after getting edited by people using different standards) and if you visit an untransliterated page, you'll be prompted for your preference.
There's no simple one-to-one correspondence for all characters, but Wikipedia has multiple layers of special cases and exceptions that can cover most situations (including vocabulary differences). That doesn't mean the text always makes sense after transliteration: The article about the Taiwanese township of Shuili mentions that it was originally named 水裡, but then renamed to 水里 in 1966. At least in the Taiwanese Traditional version https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 . If you read the Mainland Simplified one ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 ) both of these names get simplified to 水里.
I've never really bought the multiple layers of special cases and exceptions. For example, British English and American English also have many of the same differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters; e.g. British English and American English both agree on the verb form of "to curb" but disagree on "kerb" vs "curb." Yet AFAIK Wikipedia doesn't have a similar system that tries to convert from British English to American English or vice versa that also handles all these special cases apart from just the normal spelling differences.
Taiwanese Mandarin is really not that different from PRC Mandarin. In fact most college-educated mainland speakers can read works written in traditional characters just fine although I'm not sure on the Taiwanese side for simplified characters. In fact I think a substantial proportion (most?) of Chinese Wikipedia readers just don't bother with changing the character set either way and are fine with traditional/simplified character switches throughout the article (that's certainly the way I read it).
I wanted to find out whether there are any statistics on how this feature is used, but only found this Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227904 Looks like they put doing research on user needs into the backlog for now.
> Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right?
No, there is no perfect correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese collapses important characters such as “after” and “back”, often causing confusion (you can read more here [1]).
Not only that, but there are a couple of characters that are collapsed in traditional but split out in simplified:
"乾" in Simplified refers to only one of the 8 trigrams, as is used in the word "乾坤"
"乾" in Traditional can mean either the above OR the Simplified "干" (dry)
"干" also exists in Traditional but only means "stem" not "dry"
However, GP's point about translating on the fly is possible. You don't need a very advanced algorithm to translate simplified<->traditional almost perfectly. Unless you're translating poetry they can almost always be disambiguated by the nearby characters very well.
Note though that there are lots of actual word differences in mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. It's not difficult for one to read the other and maybe occasionally asking a question or two but it's nice for every human to have materials available in their native dialect and vocabulary. Much like you probably appreciate that your system offers both UK English and US English and doesn't force you to use the "other" one from what you're used to.
You should check out Singaporean English or "Singlish", which uses a lot of Chinese grammar and Hokkien and Malay vocabulary in English sentences. It's a wonderfully efficient dialect taking the best from all of these languages.
I heard it spoken when I was in Singapore. It was pretty fun, but I'm glad it isn't given equal status, and that we didn't have to learn any in school.
??? Taiwanese expression of identity has nothing to do with 'foreigners'. There's no reasonable defence for the dystopian nightmare the CCP is pursuing and the arguments fall flat. Europe was at war for 2000 years and didn't need help from outsiders, the same can be said of most places.
There probably is a pro Taiwan bias in Wikipedia, but ironically a big part of that is from China blocking access to the Chinese Wikipedia for most of its existence. Who else is left to create the Chinese content?
Amusingly enough back when I was still active editing on Wikipedia, there was a lot of trouble related to sourcing articles. Because the media in PRC itself is restricted, you have very less sources you can trust. You can't source content from sources like GT but do you trust CGTN, Xinhua? Eventually, you have to because if you don't you would be left with very less coverage and one from a western perspective even if Xinhua probably doesn't have the credibility/reputation of say BBC.
> You can't source content from sources like GT but do you trust CGTN, Xinhua?
Interestingly enough, there were some official Wikipedia decisions on that very topic recently:
CGTN and Global Times were given the lowest ranking short of being spam-blacklisted, and the consensus was Xinhua can't be trusted as a source where the PRC government would have a conflict of interest, but it can be used for more mundane coverage.
Given Taiwan recognizes China but China doesn't recognize Taiwan, a statement of fact--that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state--would be deemed "pro Taiwan" by Beijing.
Uh, what? Officially, Taiwan is the Republic of China, and claims to be the legitimate government of all of China, and doesn't recognize Beijing. This is a leftover of the civil war between CCP and KMT. The de jure situation is that the civil war is still unfinished.
There are forces that want to move away from that de jure reality. But the fact is that that move hasn't happened (yet?).
When it comes to de facto, Beijing "recognizes" Taiwan by allowing travel, communication and business. By Korean standards, China and Taiwan are unified.
The current ruling party of Taiwan, the DPP, disagrees with the One China Policy. They see Taiwan as a soveriegn nation whose territory consists solely of Taiwan and surrouding islands. Although there isn't an international agreement on this topic, the DPP sees it this way and they control the executive and legislature.
That is what I mean by "forces seeking to move away from the de jure reality".
But the fact is, the DPP hasn't officially made this move. Not yet at least.
Anyway, my point is that the person I replied to, said that Taiwan recognizes Beijing. I assert that that's officially not the case. I know, de facto situation is different, but in international relations, and when it comes to international law, the de jure reality matters a lot. Official UN procedures follow the de jure reality, not the de facto one.
And this latter is one of the reason why China behaves like a "grammar nazi" on these matters. They have to, if they want to keep the current de jure reality. It's like a company sending tons of cease and desist letters to all people who produce fan content: it's not necessarily because they want to upset fans, but it's because if they fail to enforce, then they lose the trademark.
is part of this due to all the current unofficial policy of "deliberate ambiguity"? If the DPP does officially make a move to state that ROC is Taiwan and a sovereign entity, would that be one condition that might prompt a PLA invasion?
Yes. PRC has a couple of diplomatic red lines, which have been consistent since 1949, and Taiwanese independence is one of them.
It seems that otherwise, unless the US militarily supports Taiwan, the PRC doesn't care whether Taiwan is de facto independent as long as they don't declare so.
I think it is unfair that FooBarWidget's comment is being downvoted.
I have no dog in this fight, but the HN rules state that you should not downvote a comment only because you disagree -- but, instead, because it does not add value to the discussion or is not constructive.
Just keen to protect HN from downvoting less popular views.
> the HN rules state that you should not downvote a comment only because you disagree
Despite this. both pg and dang have said this is OK.
Edit: Actually, I just went over the guidelines in detail (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and there is no mention of appropriate or inappropriate use of the downvote. Where did you see this?
> HN rules state that you should not downvote a comment only because you disagree
I totally agree with this. Unfortunately HN has gone completely down under now. I get downvoted to oblivion and sometimes even being flagged, every time I say an unpopular opinion, even when I give a full technical explanation to the discussion. I once got downvoted, flagged, and censored out for pointing out un-inclusive language, for example, and another time got downvoted several times for pointing out what I think are very valid privacy issues with Apple's practices.
If I were to make a suggestion, HN should require a reason to hit the downvote button. Otherwise this just amounts to censorship of unpopular opinions.
And in this case it's going to unfortunately turn into a popularity contest fight of up/down arrows between both sides of the Taiwan issue and frankly speaking that's unproductive. I think westerners who haven't studied that aspect of history really should see the historic facts as well as reasons behind why each side has their view. You don't have to agree with both but it's worthwhile understanding the origins in both viewpoints.
UPDATE (9/25 15:14): The downvote army is here again! I personally think I'm contributing to this discussion above, but yet they're still downvoting me.
>HN should require a reason to hit the downvote button
That's an interesting thought. What if there were an optional drop-down menu that allowed down-voters to provide canned feedback?
Either way, I think you'd enjoy the discussion more if you worried less about voting. Unless you're selling something, the popularity of the sentiment you're expressing isn't especially relevant.
I'm not super worried about voting per se. If I get downvoted to death and my account banned, I'll have my discussions elsewhere than HN, and I have plenty of venues to have intellectual debate of higher quality than being downvoted and gagged every time I speak an unpopular opinion. I'm still probably far from that based on my current karma, but I've seen a noticable change in the quality of the community in the past year or so.
It's just that I think it could be a great platform for controversial intellectual discussions, but the algorithm is designed to promote conformity rather than raising unpopular but well-backed opinions. For example, I've gotten my speech muffled by the algorithm every time I speak out against specific Apple practices, or against the current version of capitalism (not even capitalism as a general idea, which I agree with, just not the current implementation). Somehow saying something against Apple or contemporary American capitalism on HN is just like saying something against the leader in authoritarian regimes; you'll be flagged, beaten (downwvoted), muted, and banned by the community.
I definitely like the drop-down idea. "I disagree" would not be one of the options for downvote. Some of the valid options I can think of are:
Agreed. There's more than a few topics where I self censor. It isn't about the points. Most of these things are either beating a dead horse or the quality of the responses aren't worth engaging with. Some are just too contentious. Other times, I just can't resist.
It is disconcerting to see the popular or establishment view presented with different standards of evidence, sources or logic.
I'd leave "I disagree" as an option in this hypothetical. The down-voting user would have it as a shadow vote, without impacting the comment.
For scientifically inaccurate, I think they should be prompted to reply with a refutation.
Needs elaboration should just open a reply with "Could you please elaborate on..."
You don't understand HN. There's two buttons (once you have enough points, I guess): downvote, and flag. All of the "valid options" you list above, except maybe "irrelevant to parent comment", are better served with the flag button, which will cause the comment to be deleted (if enough people agree with you) (even thus deleted (a.k.a. "flagged") comments are still visible if you want them to be).
I always felt that these things tend to get blurred together especially when tensions flare. The ideal situation for a downvote may be something that doesn't add much to the discussion, whatever that means, be it somewhat off-topic, repetition of existing information, or groundless speculation. The vote helps move that conversation down and ideally allow better more 'additive' ones to float up. But on pure disagreement, it seems like a missed opportunity to discuss. This is unrealistic, but I'd love a middle option between downvote and super-downvote (i.e. flag), where you are required to reply. The extra effort would prevent knee-jerk reactions that silence acceptable comments, but maybe would foster some constructive disagreement now that your username needs to stand behind the downvote.
Exactly. One possible fix would be that you don't actually get to see a downvote arrow on anything unless you reply to it first.
Separately, I've had thoughtfully written responses flagged for what is presumably disagreement. So may be the "flag" button needs a dropdown and the downvote button not showing up until you reply would be a good combination solution.
Indeed. There was actually a meeting of the two Presidents (Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou) a few years ago in Singapore. Iirc they carefully avoided those titles and used something like "leader of the mainland" and "leader of Taiwan" instead to go round the issue.
Of course the meeting also happened because Ma Ying-jeou is from the KMT so both sides did at least agree that this was a Chinese domestic issue.
I'd be interested to read a disinterested account of this, but note that the account at hand says that the objection was not about the Chinese (language) Wikipedia but about the activities of Wikimedia Taiwan; not about the electronic encyclopaedia, in other words, but about the association of people.
If you go by the stance of the Chinese government, there should never be a Wikimedia Taiwan. There is Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia France, etc. Note they are all countries (France, Germany, Canada). Taiwan is not a country but a rebel province (per the Chinese law).
China doesn't like it when other people use the name Taiwan. Maybe they should change it to "China Taipei"
EDIT: this is not my opinion, but what I see as reality..
If I recall correctly, at the time Wikimedia Taiwan was added as a "chapter", Wikipedia did not have a clear definition of what type of organizations became community-based affiliate organizations, which is why there are Wikimedia District of Columbia and Wikimedia New York City chapters. I'm not sure if they have any specific restrictions on what types of groups can become chapters now (although I know there are some specific reporting requirements). The current chapters are partly an artifact of which groups were made chapters during a certain period of time and which kept up the reporting requirements.
In terms of affiliated user groups, they allow people to start them with a variety of justifications, from regional groups, cultural focus groups, etc.
What if Wikimedia Taiwan had a chapter but that chapter wasn't listed if Wikimedia's website was accessed from a mainland China IP address? Much like Google maps shows different country border delineations depending on where you use it from?
Personally the way I see it is that there are multiple simultaneous realities of the situation and if you give each region what they want to see, everyone will be happy.
Because wikimedia doesnt do shit like telling people what they want to hear. If the consequences of that is china blocks our entry to WIPO, so be it. They already block chinese wikipedia which is something the wikimedia movement cares a lot more about than WIPO
That's fair, but that also means that Wikimedia is then asserting a political opinion rather than being neutral on the issue.
When something is disputed, arguably the most neutral, unbiased way to go about things is to deliver information to each party within the framework that they have established, and technology enables this as a possibility when it used to be cumbersome in the old days.
If Wikimedia wants to assert a position on the Taiwan issue, or politically help Taiwan by supporting its majority viewpoint, then great, I completely understand, though I feel like its fundamental mission would be better accomplished if it did not take sides on any political matters and strive to be the most neutral source of facts in the world.
For example, there exist certain species of birds native to the island of Taiwan. Wikipedia can be a great source of information about those birds. It doesn't need to define what type of political entity Taiwan is in order to deliver great information about those birds; as far as the birds are concerned it's just a huge island.
> When something is disputed, arguably the most neutral, unbiased way to go about things is to deliver information to each party within the framework that they have established, and technology enables this as a possibility when it used to be cumbersome in the old days.
So in wiki-speak, this view is usually refered to as multiple-points of view, and its an idea people sometimes floated in the early days (i think their was a fork called wikiinfo or something at one point)
Its very different from neutral point of view as understood by wikipedia. The goal of neutrality is to come up with a single consistent narrative that all parties agree is fair and accurate (porportionally). Of course that can be very difficult at times, its more a journey than a destination.
In my mind this is actually the killer feature of wikipedia. Without this we may as well just all host apache web servers or write articles on geocities.
>if Wikimedia wants to assert a position on the Taiwan issue, or politically help Taiwan by supporting its majority viewpoint, then great
Wikimedia does not want to do anything. Wikimedia largely speaking wants to allow some folks in Taiwan to form what is basically a local user group so they can try and talk some museums into uploading photos and maybe have a conference.
The contents of the Taiwan article is a local wikipedia matter, and is not something wikimedia (in whatever sense you mean) should have a say in.
Generally speaking though, wikipedia does not want to support the majority view of anyone, but explain all views proportionally as represented in reliable secondary sources. Of course that can be difficult at times.
> For example, there exist certain species of birds native to the island of Taiwan. Wikipedia can be a great source of information about those birds. It doesn't need to define what type of political entity Taiwan is in order to deliver great information about those birds; as far as the birds are concerned it's just a huge island.
Well yes, but nobody is really fighting about the bird articles
I have always wondered what's the play there. Since they haven't controlled it for so long, what's the harm in recognising that it's a separate nation. Taiwan's most important resource seems like the human resource, which they can reap the benefit of by having friendly relations; there is no need to launch an invasion over that.
1. Many Mainland Chinese people have the view that Taiwan is illegally occupied ever since the KMT fled there at the end of the civil war. It's as if the Confederates fled to Puerto Rico or Hawaii, still exist to this day, and claim to be the legitimate ruler of all of the US.
Although nowadays fewer people care about this, since China has surpassed Taiwan economically. But it's still a significant portion who cares. So many, that if the CCP lets Taiwan go, CCP's legitimacy will be called into question, and many people will revolt. If it's up to these people, China would have launched an invasion a decade ago.
2. Geographically, Taiwan is a military significant piece of land. The US can set up base there and blockade all China's naval traffic. China wants to prevent this.
Per capita basis Taiwan is much better, but overall PRC is a lot more stronger.
> So many, that if the CCP lets Taiwan go, many people will revolt.
CCP has the gift of being able to control the narrative though, can't they make it seem like a win-win situation for them by doing it as some grand gesture and peace through largesse of their heart.
> Geographically, Taiwan is a military significant piece of land. The US can set up base there and blockade all China's naval traffic.
While I can see the importance of Taiwan as an opening between Japan and Philippines. Can't an enemy power use Japan, SK and Philippines to still blockade from Pacific.
Also, friendly relations with an independent Taiwan might mean it remains in PRC's sphere of influence
I am not a military expert, but the analyses I've seen suggest that Taiwan is a key piece that makes or breaks the US' "first island chain", which is crucial in containing China.
Yes China can control the narrative to some extent, and historically they did. For example all of outer Mongolia was ceded to Russia. If you check Taiwan's official claims, you will see that it's much bigger than the People's Republic of China today.
The CCP has a history of ceding land (that is strategically not too valuable) in order to setup peace. I'm guessing that the military significance is the biggest reason why they're not giving up Taiwan.
I think you do know more about this, so I will trust your comment.
> The CCP has a history of ceding land (that is strategically not too valuable) in order to setup peace.
This doesn't explain their border differences with India though. For all I can understand only a small part of the western border seems of strategic importance.
I don't know too much about the China-India dispute. From what I know, the current border was unilaterally drawn by the British during India's colonial period. China and India later disagreed on this British-setup border. I heard that China did try to propose some solutions, including one in which more than 50% of the territory is ceded to India, but India has rejected all offers so far.
This article by the Asia Research Institute (set up by Kishore Mahbubani) has some background on the diplomatic history of this issue: https://ari.nus.edu.sg/app-essay-kanti-bajpai
I have read that the proposed solution included China giving up claim on Arunachal Pradesh(de facto Indian territory, South Tibet as per PRC) and India giving up claim on Aksai Chin(de facto Chinese territory, part of Ladakh as per India). Not sure why it was not pursued. Maybe India's relations with Pakistan were a factor.
If 'Mississippi' was somehow broken away from the US, the US would spend quite a lot of effort to get it back, even though Mississippi is and of itself, not important.
If one takes a historical view that Taiwan, Tibet, Manchu, S. China Sea 'belong to China' then they will push hard to grab and maintain them.
> ... even though Mississippi is and of itself, not important.
I agree that pride/hubris (more saving face) is indeed a significant component, but Taiwan has huge strategic military importance. Taiwan declaring itself independent and allowing (say) the US to set up a large military presence there would be unacceptable for China.
The geography of Taiwan is not important. There are plenty of places for the US to set up shop in that area, and the US does not want to set up shop there anyhow, because it is 'too close'. In a full-on war, there might be some advantage to the fact it's an island, but not really.
The political significance of an independant Taiwan (or not) is 100x any tactical advantage of geography.
S. China sea is actually more important because it's international water, and territory that overlaps with other countries.
I am confused about what it is that you're trying to achieve with this attitude. My point is that international law and international relations are at play, and that they matter. If you are so convinced about Taiwan, you really should do two things:
1. Convince the DPP to officially declare independence. Not just unofficially flirting with the idea, but officially still claiming all of China.
2. After 1 has happened, convince UN members to recognize Taiwan.
From a legal process point of view, I think 2 cannot happen until 1 is done.
> I am confused about what it is that you're trying to achieve with this attitude. My point is that international law and international relations are at play, and that they matter.
Taiwan is de facto an independent country in every way you could possibly conceive, including having de jure diplomatic relations with a few countries and de facto relations with many more. In international relations, actions matter more than words, and in Taiwan's case, those actions indicate that it's an independent country.
The only reason official declarations stating the obvious haven't been made is due to the threats and coercion conducted by the PRC. The presence of those threats makes the absence of the declarations literally meaningless. It's sort of like being forced to sign a contract under duress.
I do not believe that the UN is the arbiter of who is and is not a country. And Taiwan should avoid doing anything that might provoke the CCP (like declaring independence without consulting with the CCP first).
Perhaps not. But when it comes to UN institutions and their processes, they follow the official UN list of recognized nations.
And legally, how do you recognize a country that does not officially recognize itself? The Taiwanese constitution still says it is the Republic of China. The current legal situation is that, by recognizing Taiwan, you are officially saying that the Taiwanese government is the legit ruler of the mainland.
Generally speaking it was really easy to become a chapter in the old days, but now you have to be a really big org to get chapter status. So newer things are less likely to be chapters
Even though I emphasized the two different things Wikipedia and Wikimedia earlier in this discussion, you are conflating them. Wikipedia is an electronic encyclopaedia, divided up into languages. Wikimedia is the name of the Wikimedia Foundation, and (as long as they adhere to various conditions) the names of various Wikimedia chapters, like Wikimedia Taiwan, and Wikimedia thematic organizations.
Thank you. That's much more informative than the Wikimedia Foundation's own version of events. The textual account is incomplete, as there were statements by Iran, Russia, Canada, and Pakistan, and it was China that had the closing remarks, not the United States. It's also not quite an accurate transcript.
So:
It turns out that China looked up the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia.
It compared what Wikipedia said with what was in the Wikimedia Foundation's application documents.
The Wikimedia Foundation put 124 user groups, 39 geographic chapters and 2 thematic organizations on its application form.
The Chinese delegation to WIPO, deciding to trust Wikipedia in this instance, found that Wikipedia stated that the Wikimedia Foundation had 47 user groups, 41 chapters, and 1 thematic organization.
So the first prong of the objection was a formal way of saying "Did this organization lie on its application form?".
The second prong was a vague complaint against unspecified content violating the One China Policy on "the affiliated Web site of the Foundation". This could be the Foundation wiki; Wikimedia Taiwan's own WWW site (http://wikimedia.tw/); the Chinese-language Wikipedia; the English-language Wikipedia; Meta; or even something else entirely. China didn't actually say.
There's some clever chess here. For starters, the Wikimedia Foundation now has to officially state for the record that the Chinese Wikipedia does not provide up-to-date accurate information.
There are also https://baike.so.com/ , https://www.baike.com/ and probably some others I don't know about. I don't think the authorities care which one people use so long as it complies with "relevant laws and regulations" (i.e. censors content). There doesn't seem to be much user loyalty either; people use whatever their search engine puts first, so baike.baidu.com if you search with Baidu and baike.so.com if you search with so.com.
Hong Kong, Singapore, and overseas Chinese have a big impact on the Chinese content. Hong Kong even used to have a chapter (now it's a user group, for reporting compliance reasons)
I actually looked into this after writing the parent post, which was more of a frustrated quip and not grounded in data... Per this 6-years outdated page, in addition to Hong Kong, it seems Mainland China actually overtook Taiwan for edits in 2014, which is doubly surprising considering the ongoing ban and how Wikipedia could possibly tell the true origin if people use web proxies or VPNs.
>There probably is a pro Taiwan bias in Wikipedia, but ironically a big part of that is from China blocking access to the Chinese Wikipedia
>pro Taiwan bias in Wikipedia
I have previously seen these baseless accusations of Wikipedia and Reddit being pro-Taiwan and pro-India.
There are tens of thousands of pro-Chinese Leftists in the US and Europe. Just take a look at r/GenZedong and r/Socialism. They are China's main propaganda arm in the West. They are far more organized and agenda-driven than Taiwanese and Indian Internet users. They have completely taken over Wikipedia and the comment section on reddit. Anything even slightly critical of China's government gets accused of being CIA propaganda.
> I have previously seen these baseless accusations of Wikipedia and Reddit being pro-Taiwan and pro-India.
It's not that wikipedia and reddit are pro-taiwan and pro-india, it's that pro-taiwan and pro-indian propagandists have recently flooded these sites. Also, youtube.
> Just take a look at r/GenZedong and r/Socialism.
Have you tried visiting r/china or any other china related sub which are hysterically anti-china?
> There are tens of thousands of pro-Chinese Leftists in the US and Europe
That's it? A few thousand?
> Anything even slightly critical of China's government gets accused of being CIA propaganda.
Give me a break.
I'm sure there are pro-china groups on social media. But there is a hell of a lot more anti-china groups. Go to most china-related thread on reddit I can guarantee you that the anti-china propagandists outnumber the pro-china propagandists 10-1. You aren't doing yourself and the anti-china propagandists any favors by playing the victim here. Especially when your claims are so obviously false.
>But there is a hell of a lot more anti-china groups.
I didn't encountered many, to be honest. There are anti-CCP groups, which is something different. Also, being anti-ccp and criticise their human rights violations doesnt make you a "propagandist".
> I didn't encountered many, to be honest. There are anti-CCP groups, which is something different.
Ah yes. "CCP". A wonderful new propaganda term that suddenly sprung out of nowhere. What happened to chinazi or the myriad other propaganda terms you guys used? There are certainly a lot of "anti-china", I mean "anti-ccp", propaganda all over social media suddenly.
> Also, being anti-ccp and criticise their human rights violations doesnt make you a "propagandist".
Sure. But most of those who are "anti-china" and criticize their human rights violations are propagandists. Actually, I'd say almost all of them are propagandists. Especially on reddit and other social media platforms.
This is apparent to anyone who has used reddit, youtube, etc. To claim the "anti-china" group is the victim, as the throwaway account claimed, is absurd. It's a lie like most of the anti-china propaganda on social media. But that's the business you guys are in right?
I found WIPO remarkably anti "open access innovation" and very pro "lets promote property rights in the digital realm were copying a product is nearly free".
Maybe Wikimedia should steer clear of such dinosaur of an institute.
I'd naively expect the UN to have an EFF under it's wings instead of a WIPO. But then I should remember that the UN is about "nations" and nations are about the interests of the rich/elites.
We need a UP (united people) that concerns with people's well being, instead of the UN serving the profit god.
Political knowledge from Taiwan is still a part of the human knowledge. I cannot see why the Foundation's application should to be rejected by such a weak argument.
WIPO is about intellectual property. That has nothing to do with human knowledge and everything to do with legal structures to enable government granted monopolies over ideas (patents), expression (copyright), and identification (trademarks).
If anything the "human knowledge" on Wikipedia is the remit of UNESCO, which is "United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization".
Wikimedia wanted oberver status at WIPO to be "inside the halls" when WIPO is making decisions that might affect Wikimedia's purpose, which it states as "We help everyone share in the sum of all knowledge."
China does not like freedom of press and freedom of information that wikipedia represents. They want the source of information to be only from government approved resources.
I would hope Wikipedia concentrates being Wikipedia. Other "follow WIPO" activities should be left to other parties.
Focus on core with small money. That is the way to go.
Wikipedia is a great source for non political information such as chemistry or computer science facts but at the point material intersects with politics in any tangential way it is strongly biased source of information. I could see it having a particularly difficult time dealing with China and cultural differences its moderators are unable to handle.
China Daily (link below) is known to have ties to the CCP:
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201909/02/WS5d6c719ea310cf...
"Editor's note: This is the first of two stories in which China Daily will examine educational issues that experts say are a root cause of young people's participation in the Hong Kong protests."
And https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/49/20/205/156747748453...
"Editor's note: This is the second of two stories in which China Daily examines educational issues that experts see as a root cause of young people's participation in the Hong Kong protests."
"U.S. officials told the Journal that they have been aware of the backdoor access since 2009 but declined to say if the company actually used this access since it was discovered."
(again, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Huawei that details one such security incident/compromise, which U.S. officials declined to mention -- I suppose this puts their decision in context, if you read between the lines)
Does Huawei have ties to the CCP? While not stating this outright, it's hard to argue that $30 billion dollars' worth of funding comes with no strings attached:
The bottom line (tl;dr): " The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.
[...]
Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned."
“World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, IP, trademarks, patents and related issues.”
3rd paragraph in the article:
“WIPO’s work, which shapes international laws and policies that affect the sharing of free knowledge, impacts Wikipedia’s ability to provide hundreds of millions of people with information in their own languages. The Wikimedia Foundation’s absence from these meetings further separates those people from global events that shape their access to knowledge.”
Fair enough. I just figured that it would be worthwhile reminding people that search engines exist and should be used first.
Also, I must admit to not having clicked the link first, as I usually go to the comments to get an idea of if it's worthwhile before going through. However, I should have gone to the link and then come back and commented.
It is true. So much as stating that the Republic of China (Taiwan) is a de facto independent country with its own territory, military, government, and permanent populace is political. The existence of many Wikipedia pages about Taiwan that reflect that is an inherently political activity (from CCP perspective).
Isn't everything political these days? Advocating against govt backdoors is "political". Advocating for LGBT rights is "political". Joining WIPO is political, because they clearly want to influence how intellectual property laws are developed/written.
Maybe it's time to cut off the giant LAN from the internet WAN proactively.
Picking and injecting selected info to 1.4B people over time is worse than no info IMHO, as the former will produce extreme thoughts which could be dangerous.
It seems to me this Wikimedia Foundation === Country Level Only Status is bullshit.
Yes, we catalans have another separate language besides spanish that grants for ourselves a whole encyclopedia in it (viquipedia. that's catalan wikipedia).
So I don't see why Wikimedia Taiwan should be an issue regardless of the status of Taiwan inside China itself?
And yes, the situations are 0 comparably in real life... just my random POV