Maps, Territory, and Place Names in China

China’s Provinces

Sixty?

China’s 60 high-level administrative divisions.

Not the standard map of China, is it? It’s one of several mock-ups floating around the web of a new scheme to balance China’s administrative divisions. This particular scheme draws up twelve cities, thirty-six provinces, eight autonomous regions, and four special administrative regions; another popular map lists a total of 50 divisions.

Despite the official-looking map, it’s fairly obvious that such a radical redistricting scheme would cost far too much for whatever benefit it would have in equalizing administrative loads. The rumors first appeared in Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Bo in March 2004, reports Beijing Youth Daily, and spread to mainland media outlets, who kept the story alive for close to one year. It still makes the rounds of bulletin boards and forums.

One reason for the longevity of this rumor is that it’s not entirely invented. Before the revolution, and at least nominally in Taiwan to date, China contained 35 provinces, fourteen provincial-level municipalities, two regions (Mongolia and Tıbet), and one special administrative region (Hainan), for a total of 52 divisions. Shuffling of provinces and municipalities continued throughout the 1950s, but the substantially reduced number of administrative regions decided upon in 1954 essentially put an end to the high numbers found in the first half of the century.

Beijing Street Names

Revolutionary Beijing and the ‘Renaming Campaign’

Following the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, a “renaming craze” took hold of the country. Names of streets, schools, districts, temples, and individuals were altered to make them more red, more revolutionary. Columnist Feng Donghang writes in Zhongshan Economic News:

On 18 August, 1966, Mao Zedong received the Red Guards at Tian’anmen. Song Binbin, a student at the middle school attached to Beijing Normal University and daughter of Song Renqiong, the former secretary of the central committee of the northeast, had the honor of putting the red armband on Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong asked her name and Song answered. Mao Zedong then asked whether it was the ‘bin’ in ‘elegant’ (文质彬彬), and said “You need to be fierce!” This was put into a report by the Xinhua News Agency, and Song Binbin that day changed her name to Yaowu (要武, “need ferocity”). The school she attended was changed to “Hongse Yaowu Middle School” (Red needs to be fierce), and the next day she wrote an essay in People’s Daily signed Yaowu. From that point the entire country was swept up in renaming as a sort of fashion.

Stills from the mainland documentary Ten Years of the Cultural Revolution (文革十年)

The photo above shows red guards replacing the sign for East Yangwei Road, which ran in front of the Soviet Embassy. At the time, China opposed the Soviet’s “revisionism,” so renaming a street “Anti-Revisionism Road” was a dig at Khrushchev and his repudiation of Stalin’s ideological excesses. The Soviet ambassadors complained about their address change, but it wasn’t until 1979 that Anti-Revisionism Road was returned to a more prosaic East-Central Dongzhimen Road.

Beijing’s trolley buses were revolutionized as well, with route numbers supplanted by patriotic descriptions. Route #1 became the Red Guard Route, #2 became the Anti-Imperialism Route, #4 became The East is Red Route, #10 became the Eternal Revolution Route. Bus routes, too: #1 became Long March, #7 became Aid Vietnam, #20 became Red Capital, and #39 became Resist Japan. Signage lining the routes proclaimed the ultra-leftist name in large type, with the route number relegated to one-fifth of the area, while origin and destination were not indicated at all.

Changing road names in Tıbet, circa 1966.

This photo of Bаrkor Street comes from Forbidden Memory: Tıbet During the Cultural Revοlution, a photo-book with annotations by Wοeser (see here). In Tıbetan, Bаrkor means “circumnambulation” and refers to the path walked by pilgrims around the Jokhаng Temple. Because this “had the flavor of feudal supersition,” the name of Bаrkor Street was changed to “Erect the New Street” (立新大街).

Maps of China and Territorial Integrity

The status of Taiwan is an especially sensitive issue when dealing with Chinese maps. In June, 2005, for example, a shipment of textbooks to a Japanese international school in Dalian, Liaoning, was seized at customs because the books included a map in which Taiwan appeared in a different color from the mainland. Later that year, Google’s maps service got caught in the cross-straits wrangling when it removed “Province” from the label for Taiwan. Companies whose websites include “Taiwan” as an option in a “Country” selector face the wrath of mainland patriots (a typical response is to sidestep the problem by using a more ambiguous term, like “Region” or “Market”, as McDonald’s learned the hard way).

Area is another difficult question. How big is China? About 9.6 million square kilometers is the standard answer, and official figures go no more precise than that. Provincial figures are similarly imprecise, and there’s a sizeable difference when the separate areas are added together. But then China has several border areas and island chains in dispute, so the rough figure eliminates the need for diplomacy-dependent textbook revisions.

The above figure places China third, after Russia and Canada, and ahead of the United States – China’s foreign ministry has figures for the US precise to the kilometer: 9.372615 million sq km. These measurements are not the final word, however. Microsoft Encarta measures China’s area (including inland waters) at 9,571,300 sq km, with the US considerably larger at 9,826,630 sq km. The CIA Factbook measures China at 9,596,960 sq km (land area 9,326,410) and the US at 9,631,420 sq km (land area 9,161,923), but this doesn’t include Taiwan’s 35,980 sq km. Presumably the differences are primarily due to the measurement of inland water; China’s figures for the US apparently cover land only.

Map illustration from TBN.

There’s also the question of territorial waters. China claims 3 million sq km of ocean, bringing its total territory to roughly 12,600,000 sq km. Accordingly, China then ranks third in terms of land area, fourth in terms of total inland territory, and third in terms of total territory.

The oceanic territory presents a problem for graphic designers. Those South China Sea archipelagos also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan are uninhabited, undeveloped, and unlikely to become hot tourist destinations in the near future, but they appear on practically every map illustration, no matter how irrelevant their inclusion may be. Even world maps which mark no other country’s outlying islands carry the dotted line protecting China’s territorial integrity.

This map illustrates an article in The Beijing News that describes how film production has despoiled China’s nature preserves. Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have yet to film on the Spratleys, yet there they are.

More Chinese Map Information

If you are looking for more conventional information on maps in and of China, please visit Wikipedia’s guide to Chinese geography and China’s historical political divisions; the CIA Factbook on China, and Danwei’s own suicide map of Shanghai, bird’s-eye view of Zhongnanhai, and Searching for the First Ring Road.