You absolutely can and must. That is, in fact, one of the prerogatives of a superpower.
[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.]
Edit: It was this - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/game.php
It looks like someone has made one here though: http://gametheorytest.com/gerry/game/
But those maps do describe reality.
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.
It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.
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.
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?
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
Only when maps were used for other purposes was there any reason to develop other projections.
> 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.
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.
OTOH I don't have much confidence in the middle manager theory, either.
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.
Your social credit score will go down if you do.
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).