This is obviously a tangent to the author's main point, but it is interesting because it makes me curious if the author purposely included Taiwan so that his blog post would not be banned from dissemination in China based on Chinese government rules on "One China": https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3033331/d...

Agreed, it's certainly significant given the context.

Please let's not go off topic into that one. A plausible interpretation is that someone made a mistake. Even if it wasn't a mistake, there's no new information here that could support a discussion, so we'd end up with a generic Taiwan/China flamewar. Such threads are bad because they're repetitive and predictable, and of course get nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's not off topic. Millions of people live in Taiwan, including yours truly.

Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO and other geo-political bullying notwithstanding, the situation regarding this outbreak is dramatically different here than it is in China.

The impacts of travel restrictions on people who have recently visited Taiwan are also dramatically different than those who have recently visited China.

Indeed, it is not off topic when the topic is "Mapping Coronavirus, Responsibly."

One practical implication of grouping Taiwan with China is that Italy banned travel from Taiwan along with China, even though the situation in Taiwan is basically fine.

It's also not plausible that the author, a professional cartographer, just made a mistake about Taiwan.

> One practical implication of grouping Taiwan with China is that Italy banned travel from Taiwan along with China, even though the situation in Taiwan is basically fine.

It is interesting that Russia acted differently from Italy: to ban travel from China but not from Taiwan.

Listen there are comments on the post itself raising the idea that responsible includes proper borders let's take the party there and let poor HN off the hook for once

And I agree the implications are far reaching as are the chilling effects and the fact of the inclusion of Taiwan on this map is more relevant than the rest of the article in many people's eyes cannot be discounted

It's clearly done on purpose: the third graph is explained as "Here’s a bar chart of the number of cases by Chinese Province." and it includes Taiwan in the list. So it's not clearly not a mistake. This is of course inacceptable, and people (including myself) are in their right to point it and complain about it.

It seems unlikely that someone posting on the blog of ArcGIS, a geographic information system, made a "mistake" by being unaware of the geopolitics of Taiwan vs the People's Republic of China.

I don't think it's at all likely that this author is consciously making an explosive political claim about Taiwan in a post about epidemiological cartography. If you or anyone thinks otherwise, find some evidence and make a separate submission about it. You could begin by asking the author.

In the absence of additional information, all we're going to get is the same old predictable geopolitical talking points. That's what happens when there's nothing but a single bit of provocation to talk about. That sort of high-indignation, low-information discussion is off-topic on HN.

Within your goals to keep HN as clean as you have (incredibly) done, this makes sense.

I don't know how to reconcile your goals with another person's rejection of any kind of normalization of Chinese threatening of Taiwanese sovereignty. Perhaps the only option is for those unwilling to let articles get away with glossing over Taiwanese sovereignty unchallenged to get banned / downvoted to oblivion. I think that's acceptable, though sad, because I like it here.

The explanation would be the desire to sell GIS products in a particular region.