So Openstreetmap must be illegal in China!
And indeed it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China
Of course that doesn't stop people from mapping every bench in China https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99...
South Korea does it too. It forbids Google from access to its official map. Only local enterprises are licensed to get it. Precisely, the government bans the export of geographical data abroad. Check out the 243rd page of a US government report on trade barrier: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2024%20NTE%20Report_1.p...
The consequences for them seem a bit more urgent, though, given Seoul lying in artillery range of the DMZ.
Yes, I'm sure obfuscating Google Street maps will prevent DPR artillery from accurately striking targets in Seoul.
Given some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did.
Also, infosec isn't binary. Obfuscating Google Maps might not prevent the DPRK from doing terrible things to Seoul, but not obfuscating it would probably make it easier for them to do so.
some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine
This may have gone past me (I mostly remember the highly non-genius tactics), do you have some examples?
I’m sure the American tax payers are sending in billions of dollars because Russia is highly non genius lol. Get your head out your ass
In Russia several hundreds of thousands of casualties is genius.
There doesn't seem to be any reliable casualty numbers from the war. It's entirely possible there are more Ukrainan than Russian casualties.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-ta...
Exactly, Russia has been “dying” for years now but there’s only one country crying in the media.
Russia doesn't have any media to cry in, so there's that.
I was thinking of the combined casualties. It's not something to celebrate to hurt so many people for the benefit of the thieves in the Kremlin.
They seem to have placed GPS guided glide wing packages on old WW2 stylebombs dropped from bombers.
:-/
The UMPK packages look janky to the eye but JDAM is exactly the same thing and nobody makes snarky comments on the internet about that.
On one hand, I’m quite sure South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have, and they decided to obfuscate the maps so… who knows, I guess they decided it helps.
On the other hand, given that NK is using, what, WW2 vintage artillery, I can’t see how. They are probably aiming “south” with magnitude “lots,” right? What good is a 500 meter offset, or whatever, going to do when they are just aiming at the city in general.
On the third hand, if you've ever had to interact with a Korean bank over the internet (or read any of the laws that constrain this interaction), then yes,
South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have
in approximately 1998. and then never again. if it's not broken (for the chaebols), well...
Autocratic governments can be surprisingly inefficient / bad at things.
Note the bias against China in the comments here vs South Korea which is effectively doing the same thing.
South Korea is currently at war with a hostile oppressive totalitarian neighbour.
China is at war with its people.
Doesn't Taiwan still claim the mainland as its own, at least in theory? Also there are border conflicts with e.g. India.
Taiwan only continues to claim it because rescinding the claim would be seen as "separatist" and thus a casus belli for the CCP to end the status quo.
This is a false equivalence
South Korea is currently at war with North Korea in what is known as the Korean War.
China and the US also fought in what is known as the Korean War.
You can't claim SK and NK are at war with each other while implying China and US are not at war with each other. It's exactly the same war.
If you want to put it that way, the United Nations is at war with North Korea.
Note the topic is about china and any restriction of "public" data will gather negative comments. The only bias i am seeing is yours.
I saw the same in remote regions of eastern India (day dreaming about visiting them). Streets where river flows, interest point in the middle of wide river bed. Not far from china per se, but definitely a different country.
The functional implications of this are a little different.
Google, Bing, and others specifically have bitmap maps that are served out of Korea for this purpose. You can see it in Bing since the maps for Bing Maps use the classic Microsoft ~~ditches and diversions~~ Streets and Trips style maps.
In Google, there’s a few spots in Japan that are rendered in Korea at some zoom levels.
There’s been a lot of discussion on how to improve OSM in SK but it’s often through analog holes that are plausibly illegitimate.
I talked about it previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555567
My understanding is it forbids the hosting of the government collected (and curated, e.g. with regard to military bases) data outside the country, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat....
See also, https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea, which relates the situation the same way. It doesn't seem like anyone is hassled for editing openstreetmap from here (and it is quite voluminous), so long as it is not a derivative work of the public surveys.
There is an alternative military-base removed tileset variant, but I believe this is to aid korean GIS users who may not want their application to show sensitive installations, which can generate controversy.
Here’s where it gets interesting — GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m.
Holy shit. I can't believe they created an adversarial mapping standard. That is insane. It really paints a picture of their worldview I think. The oppressed "middle kingdom" under siege. Wow, what it must be like to have that view that everyone else is against you, and you have to bulwark yourself at every opportunity. Yet somehow, balance that with the "historical trend of opening up". It's a scary attitude, and must be scary to try to implement it.
I never saw China like that before. This 1 article changes my mind about a few things. Even the map math is preparing for war! I kind of feel sorry for them. It's been like 70-some years but their war is not complete. And scary for the world: I hope they don't have to seek a cathartic resolution of whatever internal conflict they have by projecting it externally.
I don't see them like that, but details like this add support to that idea, I think. I had no idea maps were like this before today.... :(
Tho reading some other comments, it seems it's not so hard to undo this...maybe this is not really about war or such attitude tho...but then why? Why add that specialness to make it that much harder for people ? That in itself could speak volumes. It's a map, it's kind of representative of a national idea. How can you be for "opening up" but you make your maps different to everybody itself, and not necessarily better! Hahaha :) Maybe I'm just misunderstanding it.. haha :)
Given e.g. the USA military buildup in the South China sea, perhaps the paranoia isn't entirely unfounded?
Are you just going to ignore the fact that China has been illegally building dozens if not hundreds of military bases there in international waters and is now trying to claim that it owns this territory?
That probably makes the paranoia even more founded? Especially when their (perceived) adversary has the habit of regularly starting illegal wars.
And let's not forget that the US recently stationed troops on a tiny Taiwanese island that's less than ten miles from the Chinese mainland. And at a time when the US is sabre-rattling over Taiwan, and is about to give Taiwan billions of dollars for "defence". And elsewhere in the world, the US almost seems to be trying to start WWIII.
In the current climate, being paranoid is the sensible option.
I think in geopolitics it's probably always sensible to be a little paranoid...or have some people whose job that is. But I think the Kinmen thing is less big than it seems. It's already a militarized Taiwan island, and Taiwan and China are officially "still at war", so arguably the more provocative move is Taiwanese military presence there.
A handful of US troops is not a significant deployment, and I think there's many ways that US and Chinese militaries actually collaborate and communicate, and one of these is (most likely) through the plausibly deniable route of Taiwan.
You misunderstand the job of these troops.
Forward deployment like this are not there to threaten China. They are there, to tie down USA politicians.
Suppose China makes a move on Taiwan, now they have to play around US troops or fear bringing USA into the war. US politicians now have troops stuck in a war zone, they can no longer just was their hands of the situation - that would be politically unacceptable.
Imagine if Russia had even symbolical amount of troops stationed in Gaza, Israel would be in a difficult position, indiscriminate fire can kill them and start an incident
And elsewhere in the world, the US almost seems to be trying to start WWIII.
What? Where? Can you give some examples?
is about to give Taiwan billions of dollars for "defence"
Why quote defence? You think they give it for offence?
I suppose you're a citizen of the West; then US hegemony is certainly in your best interest.
I suppose you're a citizen of the West; then US hegemony is certainly in your best interest
I am guessing you are from US, and you guys do not notice that quite often, domestic US politics shifts and you have a schism and throw one of your ‘allies’ under the bus.
Mr. Macron he just made a speech about how Europe can no longer rely on US.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-25/macron-sa...
Yeah, I get that. Tho back then when this was originated China and the US were closer. The coolness came later. China definitely feels encircled militarily and with policy, and watching how NATO has pushed up against Russia's territory provocatively probably does not help assuage those sentiments. Hahahaha! :)
It’s a fairly common practice to have a localized geodetic datum defined for a country. WGS84 isn’t necessarily sufficiently accurate for all purposes, continental plates drift, the ellipsoid can be adjusted to local circumstances and so forth. When you want to compare very precise measurements over time, WGS84 is too imprecise.
Most of course avoid obfuscating their own maps, it seems like that is a result of 2002 legislation coming out of Beijing. There’s a long history of doing this, civilian Soviet maps often simply omitted a grid.
While mapping an adversary is comparatively trivial and cheap today, this sort of thinking wasn’t entirely unreasonable back during the cold war, when maps truly were hard to develop from afar (there’s a brilliant and beautiful book on this subject called “The Red Atlas”). There’s a saying that generals often fight the last war, maybe that’s why China chose to obfuscate their maps well into the satellite and GPS era.
Old habits die hard I guess. Haha!
mapping an adversary is comparatively trivial and cheap today
Sorry what? Mapping is not anything close to trivial or cheap, even today. Apple took 4 years just to build a map of the SF Bay Area. Nor is it fixed or rapid, in an active war situation, presumably new targets would be built and moved quickly.
Tho reading some other comments, it seems it's not so hard to undo this...maybe this is not really about war or such attitude tho...but then why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
There is a licence fee associated with using this mandatory algorithm in China.
Tax dollars? And appeasing the bureaucracy?
Also, looking at the citation note, I get the impression that a Mr. Li Chengming probably got closer to his next promotion by putting his name on it.
It's really not that big a deal either, if you're an autocracy where controlling all access to accurate information is seen as the natural, normal, default thing to do. "Preparing for war", perhaps you could call it, but as much against their own people.
Attributing to intention that which can be adequately explained by dysfunction?
Dysfunction from another point of view could be seen as utlity haha! :)
The problem is, such power structures tend to find their purpose eventually.
The standard has been reverse engineered before: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform
I honestly don't know why companies simply don't implement it. It's not really "secret" -- or if it is, it's an "open secret".
Oh, I thought it was less like a Playstation DRM and more like something that would be harder to do. Tho I guess that makes sense. Probably companies don't want to run afoul of Chinese law which is fair.
Wow, what it must be like to have that view that everyone else is against you
This is true. Anti-Chinese sentiment right now is high worldwide. And had been high since the 19th century. Look up Chinese Exclusion Act.
It's not so much what is said, but what it is or could be used for.
I believe this is due to communist forces being under siege since the beginning of the ideology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_mentality
See how other nations dealt with the Russian revolution, and subsequently.
From CCP's perspective it has been surrounded by enemies from even before the founding of the PRC.
Remember violence begets violence.
The US having a dedicated intelligence agency for maps seems to defeat most of the military value of this system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
Pretty insane for the writer or even China/Russia to believe the US, with all of its resources, wouldn't be able to make their own accurate maps.
Pretty insane for you to believe that a foreign country from afar could produce mapping data with the same degree of accuracy, detail and realtime freshness as a local provider on the ground. Of course there's military value in protecting mapping data from foreign adversaries, at the very least it adds a a time delay and some uncertainty to the data. It also probably makes it harder for some unsophisticated terrorist to strap a consumer GPS to a stock drone and accurately hit a target.
There's no need to speculate. Even with 1960s tech and no physical access, the US military somehow managed to produce really good maps of the USSR, superior to those that were available to the public. So ironically, the intentional inaccuracy of USSR-made maps affected domestic users the most.
In 2024, with satellites producing imagery in ~10 cm resolution, the most important factor determining the quality of maps is probably the amount of money available for analyzing satellite imagery into maps, and you definitely can't hide militarily important features like roads, railways, bridges and buildings.
Sure, but there's a limited amount of information available from a satellite image. It's hard to tell what's going on inside a building, for example.
The subject is the ability to make accurate up to date maps out of satellite imaginary. I fail to see how this is a counter argument against that.
The images might have ~10cm resolution, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be larger scale systematic offsets and other distortions for larger tiles.
I recently learned that satellite images are often corrected to match known maps.
Pretty insane for you to believe that a foreign country from afar
US spy satellites can take sharp pictures which look they were taken by a drone is flying close to the ground.
Could something like the SR-71 or hot air balloons be used to make accurate maps? In my head satellites which are expensive only follow one orbital path but a plane or a balloon can cover multiple regions
define "afar" given the level of resolution of the US spying satellites
Russia had accurate maps of the UK back in the cold war, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
Not just accurate: far and away the most accurate.
It’s nice that USSR dedicated more money to this than UK government did
> Pretty insane for the writer or even China/Russia to believe the US, with all of its resources, wouldn't be able to make their own accurate maps.
Pretty weird to think the US is the only country they might be worried about. Maybe not right now, but in general.
Do they?
The US also has a dedicated non-intelligence agency for maps as well, and they are famous for making extremely good ones.
Here is an open source implementation that converts from WGS84 to GJC2:
https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/...
https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/...
And converting the other way by a kind of binary search, I guess using a flaw in the obfuscation:
https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/...
All seems very silly by today standards and I would think it hardly made sense back in 2002 when this was apparently devised.
As a means to keep detailed maps out of the hands of an enemy it's indeed not great. As it's all rather obvious to reverse engineer this and people have indeed done so.
But as a means to force foreign companies to use Chinese data suppliers this works perfectly. Because using this software would be illegal in China and anyone looking to business there legally would end up having to use Chinese data centers, Chinese data suppliers, Chinese infrastructure, etc.
Some elaborate technical trade barrier? I think that is giving them too much credit.
This is thinking from a military apparatus stuck in the 1950es.
Maybe not planned as a barrier, but effectively being one now? So this could be a reason why not to revert it.
Once you make something a standard it is hard to get rid of it even if there is an obvious better approach.
Mapping is explicitly regulated so no need for an indirect barrier.
AFAIK it is the same other places. If a Chinese company wanted to do an extensive commercial map of the US it would face all sorts of regulative hurdles.
No need to speculate. The reasons for it were stated explicitly, as the article mentions. They are, briefly, to “promote mapping” for “national economic construction”, “national defense”, and “social development”.
To be fair, they say that about literally every initiative they undertake.
Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction.
It was very transparently an economic and technical development policy from the start, it was never intended as a military policy to hinder enemy mapping ability.
They do similar information control across many other industries besides maps. The CCP is very good at gatekeeping access to foreign/uncensored information through a few state-owned enterprises, then metering it out as they see fit for economic progress.
Some elaborate technical trade barrier? I think that is giving them too much credit.
One-way knowledge flows is an ubiquitous and consistent facet of china's commercial policies.
China has been for some time a mercantile state that believed trade surplus and subsidising local production would create geopolitical strategic outcomes in its favour.
It's a bit less like that now as Xi drifts into a more personal dictatorship.
Pretty nuts. The entire chinese population lives in a state of perpetual formation and "harmony" with the crony capitalist thugs that operate from behind the curtain. And this is just another case of crony capitalist bullshit. It's not at all about "protecting maps from the enemy". It's about controlling and delving out access to a good-ole boy network (party members and their cronies)...The US and Europe are heading down the same paths but they'll never get to the level of maniac cult-like manipulation that China has achieved over a billion people.
Maybe GJC2 can be modified on the fly, by changing offset parameters? So in a hypothetical war situation, only providers obtaining data in realtime from "authorized" sources would have access to accurate targeting information.
Nah, because the thing is the Russian and US militaries will have their own maps of China anyway. There's a reason the UK's mapping agency retains the historic name of the Ordinance Survey, maps has always been a military thing and they've always retained surveyors.
This reminds me of a fascinating book titled "The Red Atlas" by John Davies and Alexander Kent which is about the very detailed maps of Western cities the Soviet Union created during the Cold War.
Not unless you want to change all the map data.
This just seems bizarre. What’s to stop companies in other countries from meaningfully mapping China using satellite data? Can’t they figure out the amount of obfuscation or use AI algorithms to align the maps correctly?
As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping them is that China considers it illegal for them to do so. Companies that provide a map of China would probably also like to operate in China, so they comply with their laws.
someone raised this point in another discussion about it, but I wonder if that's the main aim why you need the obscure algorithm in the first place, couldn't you just have these laws about maps of any standard?
(National) Security theatre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
Plus everyone who's involved will get richer.
None, other than their personal safety (when the person enter China border, that's include Hong Kong), or if they want to enter China market.
The obfuscation algorithm has already been reverse-engineered, so no AI is needed.
https://wuyongzheng.github.io/china-map-deviation/paper.html
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Back when surveying was analog. Way back in... 2002?
Yes, it’s just market protectionism. There’s no military advantage to doing this.
It's a rent seeking scheme. The algorithm is already reverse-engineered and you can download it from your favorite package manager. But in order to operate legally in China you need to purchase the "decryption module" from the surveying department.
I am not a fan of China, but not wanting coordinates of strategic targets in your country to be precisely known doesn't seem crazy. Other restrictions they have like not being able to access the Internet, or being put in reeducation camps, or not having a say in how your government is run would affect me badly. But if navigation in my car worked fine, would I care if topography is a bit distorted? During the pandemic, I saw US federal, state and local government restrict my freedom in much more drastic ways, even after I was already vaccinated. I know it was even worse in China, but I would still focus on these other things and rather than not having precise coordinates of a military base.
Topography in the navigation app will not be distorted for Amap or Baidu map. They looks correct.
Maybe people just don't know how important a navigation app is. With enough usage data, you can know the traffic status of any area. Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light. It has 90% accuracy. You can also have a deep understanding of the economic status, or find out some hidden buildings.
So for an algorithm which is already reverse engineered many years ago, it cannot protect anything. It is just a policy to stop foreign companies to join this game.
As for the reason, "national security", "unacceptable risk".
Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light
It's often off by whole second or two. Disaster, I know!
It'll also tell if it can you the ideal speed to drive to hit the next green light and join a "green wave".
I wish TomTom would get in on that.
It's funny isn't it, China has a bizarre monopolistic mapping thing enforced legally and technically, and yet it's the Western companies that have basically not produced a new feature for about 10 years, despite slurping down all those petabytes of data in that time (not that Baidu and friends don't slurp data of course, and lots of it).
China isn't North Korea. By and large, people live normal modern lives there. Most are uninterested in what's beyond the firewall because it's mostly not in their language, even if they've seen it and can read English. But yeah, "don't talk about religion or politics" is basically a law instead of just a recommendation to maintain polite relationships with acquaintances.
I remember a couple of years ago someone was claiming the Three Gorges Dam was buckling and about to fail, based on the satellite views showing the top of the dam weaving back and forth. Everyone sane thought it was some interpolation bug from Google trying and failing to tile the pictures properly, but maybe this is the reason why.
It probably doesn't help that reliable sources tell me that the Three Gorges Dam is, in fact, absolutely goddamn crooked and janky. One reason they don't allow close photography of it is simply that it looks so very bad.
Grand Coulee Dam, on the other hand, despite being decades older? It's dead-on level.
And not, as it turns out, full of dead bodies (they would ruin the concrete, so the engineers didn’t allow it).
It's because when you orthorectify an aerial image, you cast rays from the earth's surface to the camera, so if your model of the earth's surface is off (like when there's a giant man made structure) your mapping also gets wonky.
Man the author did not have to resort to such a click baity title to get people to read.
“Why Google Maps can’t map China” would have been accurate and not droll.
I just opened Apple Maps and it looks perfectly fine. Tested about 10 areas and even rural areas and there was no issue. Stopped reading immediately after. I have no interest in supporting this crap.
there was no issue
You should compare with https://m.amap.com/
That seems irrelevant. The issue in the article is the mismatch between satellite data and coordinates of points and features. There doesn't seem to be such a mismatch on openstreetmap or apple maps (presumably because apple maps is based on openstreetmap to a large degree).
You just don't have to play Chinas game.
I tried using Apple Maps in China last year, and while it “looks” just fine, it definitely isn’t. In Guangzhou everything was off by 50-500 meters until it sometimes wasn’t. Completely unreliable compared to a Chinese solution.
The CCP newspaper report on this is… Interesting:
Faced with such a "hard nut", Li Chengming strengthened his confidence: "In the war years, Communists were not afraid of death. This difficulty is nothing! We must do it! And we must do it beautifully!" Under the guidance of veteran experts, he led his team to fight for a thousand years. Over many days and nights, a set of nonlinear confidentiality processing technology for topographic maps suitable for national series of scales was developed.
https://archive.ph/20110804185923/http://cxzy.people.com.cn/...
That's just hilarious honestly
Ikr? It reads like a parody of itself. You have to wonder whether anybody actually takes this seriously— The readers? Even the people writing it?
Lol, typical Chinese propaganda speech I'd say. But just to be fair,
he led his team to fight for a thousand years
The page you linked to actually said "more than a thousand days and nights", not years.
Anyone does know if that affects US capabilities do drop a bomb on relevant targets or it's just a comercial capability, like doordash not being able to route streets without a local partner?
It has no military capability impact. The situation is similar to South Korea's map.
The US military does not rely on its enemy's maps for obvious reasons.
Medium is not the best place to host your writing. I didn't even read the article because more than half of my screen was taken up by the Medium call-to-action and the Google account modal. Does anyone remember when a webpage just loaded a document?
Medium doesn't have the best user experience but their SEO is fantastic (the last time I knew)
i use reader mode in firefox/safari/orion.
Does anybody know why, when you use Google Maps in China, your GPS location matches the map and not the satellite image? I would assume the maps being in GJC-02 and the satellite images being in some other global coordinate system. So your position should line up with the imagery, not with the map. Does the GPS chip report modified coordinates when it detects it is in china? Or does Google do this itself in the software stack?
Another thing I don't understand is: OK, you are required to use GJC-02 for map data in China, and you are not allowed to convert to WGS-84. But then don't. You can directly project the map from GJC-02 to screen pixels, and from WGS-84 to screen pixels, and stuff would line up. And when you tap a point on the screen, you can report the legally mandated GJC-02 coordinates.
Yes, they apply the mandatory conversion and have gotten a license for the software to do this from the Chinese authorities. This wikipedia article has some more details on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
I've been to Shanghai and Beijing in 2010 or so, and I vividly remember that my iPhone 3G (that I jailbroke and unlocked to be able to use local Chinese SIMs, oh, those were the times...) didn't work at all for the purpose of getting around, because Google Maps GPS locations didn't match up with the map. However, there was some obscure third-party mapping software available in the app store (I think it was even the official one, not Cydia) which basically showed a Google Maps view and drew the GPS dot onto it by itself, applying the conversion first and thus fixing the display problem.
So at least back then Google Maps apparently didn't yet convert the GPS coordinates to the weird obfuscated Chinese system. But it was a big nuisance and took me a while to figure out. For the first days I thought my jailbreaking activity would have broken the GPS chip or something.
Interesting. It is illegal in some western countries too to create your own maps. Another thing with maps is that online services have different maps depending on what country you access from.
Can you give an example of a western country that restricts map creation?
Some parts of Europe. But now when I looked it up the law was actually changed like 10 years ago. Damn I'm old.
Its first two articles state why China is purposely obfuscating WGS-84 data, and in brief, they state that the law was formulated to:
1. Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction.
In other words, a senior party member's brother-in-law runs a civil engineering firm that, by pure coincidence, happens to offer a surveying service.
No one does regulatory capture better than a planned economy.
Are you referring to something specific?
For military purposes the deliberate obfuscation between geodesic datums is meaningless as detailed and correct maps of china can be derived out of traced satelity images and maped to WGS84.
Apparently Google and Bing do not have access to these "corrected" maps.
They surely do and or could if they wanted. They don't want them. It would be complicated for them to openly have them.
Youtuber Johnny Harris released a great video covering China's changing maps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=Johnn...
It's a detailed analysis of China's 2023 map, which many countries believe oversteps China's boundaries.
That's about border claims, which is a completely separate issue to what the article is talking about.
I don't understand why Google adheres to this law. They are blocked in China anyways, no?
Not having a search engine there doesn't mean they don't have any business that could be impacted by Chinese law: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul...
Also, making your employees fugitives of foreign law can make their weekend travel plans a little bit more complicated.
Super minor nit: WGS stands for World Geodetic System.
And (among minor nits) mentions of WGS-02 seem to be typos for GCJ-02.
Maps are models. All models are wrong. Some are useful.
You might have a more interesting take after reading the article?
This means that de facto, most of the world has subscribed to American mapping conventions.
That is overstating the situation; ITRS is the key standard here and it's maintained by IERS. I think WGS-84 and ITRS are somewhat aligned these days, but the exact relationship is not clear to me.
Various regional reference systems are also still widely used, for example ETRS89 in Europe, which is afaik semi-independently defined by EPN (EUREF Permanent Network).
Most notably Galileo GNSS does not use WGS-84.
The key difference between various other systems and the Chinese one is just that for the other systems the conversions to and from WGS-84 are available to high precision.
I thought they were going to say because the maps include Manchuria, Tibet, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), Taiwan, a chunk of Mongolia, and the South China Sea as part of China.
When I read the title, I first thought it was about the political dispute over the border between India and China, keyword "Actual Line of Control". Depending on your perspective, this is also why every map from the other point of view is "wrong".
https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-is-the-difference-...
Recently I noticed that in Google Maps the coordinates is somehow deobfuscated when I am back in China. That means, you'll see the map differently when you are inside China, though without a VPN Google Maps is not accessible.
It is not accurate. Straight lines become curvy at a 5 to 10 meter scale. This is obvious when you look at airport runways.
I haven't figured out what exactly leads to the different treatment from Google. I had too few opportunities to test it out. When I arrive at Germany it immediately shows wrong map of China. Another observation is that all the user-uploaded photos on Google Maps Community aren't accessible in China either.
For what it's worth, I think people were able to reverse-engineer deviations between China's scheme and Google Maps' own scheme because Google's online services un/intentionally provided information about those deviations – which its Chinese provider somehow gave to Google – which people then scraped. [1] What that says about China's strategy of relying on indigenous mapping partners is up to you to decide.
[1] https://wuyongzheng.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/china-map-devia....
I think India is too heading in this direction
Related, Google Maps does not work in South Korea. Only local Maps application.
Because of the threat of North Korea (surely North Koreans cannot find the local map application in the app store).
This ultimately means that data reported in GSJ-02 needs to be moderated in some way to account for inaccuracy, and individuals pursuing work in China will be penalised. I don’t have a solution for this,
I'm fairly certain that the NSA does.
Would a GPS navigation app still work when working with gcj-02 data? Regarding the fact that every street and landmark will be distorted . Something like the itinerary of Google map for a trip?
This article is shameless weak justification for Russian/China purposely breaking their maps.
I read the title and thought "I bet it's deliberate maliciousness from the Chinese government," and then read the article hoping I'd be wrong, but nope.
Put Apple Maps also in the “seems to be fine” category as well.
I just compared two parts of Shanghai, and Apple seemingly had no issue overlaying the roads correctly where Google maps were offset.
Fascinating. How does streets align on the Chinese maps though? If random offsets are added, nothing should align. Or 500 meters is not large enough offset to create a mess? What I mean, arrears that are parallel in reality, may not be parallel on a map.
I haven't read 3BP myself (but I have read you all discussing it numerous times), so take the following with a grain of salt:
Might this be a 2002 foreshadowing of the 2008 novel, in which GCJ-02 was meant as an anti-sophon measure?
(I checked to see when CIA had a network liquidated, but that was 2010, so —unless someone's been applying a temporal obsfucation algo— any earthling paranoia leading to metaphorical wallfacers was already in the zeitgeist before that action was taken)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8dX-A4h2DU
Indeed, despite its apparent illegality, China seems to be fairly well-supported and well-mapped by OpenStreetMap, at least in major cities. And is entirely mapped in normal WGS-84 without the obfuscation problem.
In any case, according to Wikipedia, open-source code is available to convert between WGS-84 and the obfuscated GJC-02 coordinates.
Since technology seems to have caught up with it, is there any advantage (military or otherwise) for China to persist with obfuscation? Much like the US gave up on GPS "selective availability" years ago, there would seem now days to be more economic advantage to ditching obfuscation than there is security advantage of keeping it. Is not as if the missiles of China's enemies are going to get confused by China's obfuscated coordinates.
Is it just because of inertia that GJC-02 still exists?
I want to know why Google hasn’t corrected their map overlays. The shift in the roads makes it frustrating to look at.
Because Chinese law forbids to convert their coordinates to WGS84, and using the Chinese coordinates for satellite data would give a discontinuity at the border. This is explained in the article.
Discontinuity at the border isn't a big issue compared to all locations in the country being wrong relative to the satellite view.
If Google cared enough, I'm sure they could find a solution - since Google doesn't operate in China, they don't really have to respect Chinese laws. But Google doesn't operate in China so they don't care that much and are presumably happy to leave things the way they are.
Also, keeping things the way they are keeps drawing attention to the issue, which is probably better than to try and cover it up.
I suspect that in practice that’s not true; there are a lot of ways China could make life difficult for a big international tech company, from looking the other way regarding IP theft to arresting people associated with Google on spying charges when they’re there on personal trips
Also, Google currently doesn't really have a presence in China (and, despite some to-and-fro, currently doesn't intend to reenter the market either), so it's probably not that important to them to fix these issues. I wonder if they actively update the map or if it's stuck at some point in the past?
This isn't the first time they have done something like this, Germany was stuck with Street View imagery from 2008 (and limited to larger cities) until some time last year when they decided to finally start updating it again. This was due to some privacy hubbub back when StreetView was introduced that resulted in a law allowing building owners and/or inhabitants to request that their building be blurred on StreetView. Mind you, this law didn't forbid StreetView, but it looks like Google just lost interest, or decided to wait it out...
Wrong. There are Google offices in Beijing and Shanghai, where local software engineers are employed to work there. They develop software for global usage for Google. Google just stopped providing services in China.
Sorry - by "presence" I meant providing services in China, not having offices there.
Google probably make a lot of money from Chinese advertisers, so it's unlikely that they'd antagonise the Chinese government and risk losing that cash.
"since Google doesn't operate in China, they don't really have to respect Chinese laws"
Well, they buy the data from one of the few blessed Chinese companies, which is a form of doing business, and regardless what Chinese law says Google has most likely a contractual obligation not to convert the data. In other words, if they did convert the data they'd probably not get updates anymore.
Google search may not operate in China, but that doesn't mean that we have no business or service presence in China. For instance, from 2017 up until 2022, Google Translate was available in-country [0].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-china-social-...
A significant portion of Google's Hong Kong office is dedicated to business development in China.
That's only interesting to the extent that an organization has operations in China. Google was mostly ejected from the Chinese market years ago, I thought -- hence Baidu largely taking its place there.
It would be telling if despite that rejection, they were still open to taking direction from Beijing. Google at one point was fairly friendly with US DoD. Clearly the national loyalty of multinationals isn't guaranteed.
Google was not ejected from the Chinese market, they decided to remove most of their products after Gmail was hacked.
https://www.google.cn used to show censored search results, now it only has a link to https://www.google.com.hk , which is blocked because it lacks search result censorship. But Google could use the domain for something new in the future should they choose to.
In particular, Google Ads continue to be available: https://ads.google.cn They even offer WeChat customer service!
As long as they can keep the ad money flowing, Google will comply with all necessary laws and regulations.
If Google didn't mind breaking the law they could use the previously mentioned, public code to convert the coordinates to the standard format. Could be that it wouldn't be worth it to implement that though.
Maybe to be a bit more clear than the sibling comment, the fact that it could easily be done does not mean that it is legal (in China). Google may not want to burn all bridges with China. As a private or smaller entity you can totally do this and not care, but if you're large enough you get into political squabbles.
Great point. This seems like low-intelligence autocratic bullshirt more than anything.
Does the CCP really think that the US military are going to use ordinary street msps to target their missiles and that this obfuscation will protect them from on-target hits? Sure, in WWII there were a few apocryphal instances of bad maps foiling an attack, but that was decades before mapping satellites.
As mentioned, it's been a long time since the US stopped limiting GPS resolution. This just makes CCP seem backward.
Not going to defend it, but I’ve always read it as an attempted countermeasure to unsophisticated espionage or domestic terrorism rather than an addition to their missile defense system. It’s not good enough to obfuscate targets when you can literally see and guide missiles from above their airspace, but it might trip up people operating on the street on their own or in small cells. America isn’t the PRC’s only adversary, and authoritarian dictatorships thrive only so far as they can control information and the movements of their subjects.
On the street relative addresses and way markers are enough. Think about the pre smartphone direction days.
Yeah. Like I said, not defending it, but it seems more plausible than trying to trip up foreign missile targeting by making Google Maps worse.
In some cases using consumer-level street maps could make for more accurate targeting.
Many years ago I worked on command & control systems for a US military contractor. The mapping imagery our software used from military mapping providers were high resolution but often more out-of-date than commercial offerings. One example a warfighter showed me stuck with me because it was particularly embarrassing and egregious -- military imagery showed an area with a handful of shacks in the middle of the desert but Google's satellite imagery showed that it had become a sprawling town. Because of issues like that, army warfighters were forced to regularly cross-check with Google and/or Yahoo! maps when planning operations.
It is no longer an area I work in and I would expect that military imagery is now more up-to-date, but there are likely still datapoints uploaded to OpenStreetMap that are more timely and accurate than what government contractors provide. So I would not be surprised if there are still warfighters out there cross-checking with consumer mapping providers before ordering strikes.
The general "what is over there" type questions are often more up-to-date in commercial outfits - but the military can order a satellite pass of an area that they're particularly interested in, if they need it.
So in general the commercial stuff is better, but in the specifics the military stuff will come out on top, depending on what the mission is and how much anyone cares about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
US allegedly used old map with wrong coordinates. Probably China knows well about US military tactics.
There is the cautionary tale of the US invasion of Grenada. Where because no military maps of the country could be found in time. tourist maps with a military grid penned on were distributed to the troops. While we hope our much vaunted modern systems make this impossible, the reality is, that any large scale operation is a series of fuck ups while people figure out how to make it work.
https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/military-history/2018...
It's really not about missle/drone defense at all.
It's just an economic policy to help local mapping tech get good without international competition, and to control access to information by channeling it through domestic state-controlled enterprises.
I don't think so but it would be an embarrassment for the government to admit it no longer serves a use and such an action would be anathema to them.
Why would it be an embarrassment to say something has outlived its usefulness?
Changing it could mean they made the wrong decision in the first place, which could make Important People lose face by possibly being at fault. Of course, they could try to present things in a different way, but potentially inviting criticism by rectifying mistakes isn't going to be looked upon warmly unless the people involved are all dead or out of favor.
It's also not exclusive to China/authoritarian countries. Plenty of European countries have de-facto decriminalized cannabis by rarely enforcing laws on possession (I'm reminded of how often I saw people openly smoking weed on the street in Berlin years ago), yet politicians don't want to be the one to stick their neck out and say that the war on drugs failed or cosign the use of a particular substance -- even if their electorate largely would agree with them.
Can anyone point me to an open source implementation converting GJC-02 to WGS-84? The next time I debate with my Chinese peers on why this obfuscation is stupid, I need a reference.
And to answer your question, it's because anyone proposing to break away from the current model will be accused of being a Western agent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220072
So it is https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform
Probably just China suffering from the same problem most of the world has, boomers that don't really understand technology running the government.
That could also be part of the problem, the 14 companies that currently provide all mapping services in China, and everyone who uses their services, would have to convert to WGS-84. No doubt those companies will do everything they can to keep the law as it is.
Back when the decision was made, most of the people running the government had studied engineering. A very common pattern in all industries in China are laws that ultimately lead to protectionism by forcing foreign companies to only work with local partners. This is exactly the consequence of this law. I'd be very surprised if that was not intended by law makers from the get go.
Standard issue Chinese protectionism, they do this with basically every industry. Create a problem and then only allow CCP-approved organizations to solve it.
It creates a legal fig leaf for the usual Chinese protectionism.
I think it’s always the problem with a closed system, there’s no way for some better decision making to happen. The very idea that obfuscation of maps will help China be more secure or competitive is absolutely absurd.
It seems that even taking geotagged photos is illegal in China, indeed some camera models automatically disable geotagging when inside China: https://ogleearth.com/2012/05/why-do-panasonic-leica-fujifil...
The government can use facial recognition etc, yet the people can't even make maps. What a nightmare of a country is that.
Ironic, that socialist/communist regimes always win power on the idea of giving control and ownership of assets back to "the people"
The reality, of course, is that the people end up giving control and ownership to a one-party state.
The four remaining Marxist-Leninist states are China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Marxi...)
In 2024, their Freedom Indices (out of 100) are:
China: 9
Cuba: 12
Laos: 13
Vietnam: 19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
Those "freedom indices" come from countries that are all located in the Western sphere of influence, it's like relying on the opinion of an Arsenal supporter when talking about Tottenham (and vice-versa).
I can access Xinhua without using a VPN in the US, and cannot be prosecuted for using a VPN.
I cannot access BBC in China without using a VPN, and can potentially be prosecuted for either action.
I can say Biden/Trump are horrible and need to rot in jail, and my comment with not be deleted by a censor. If I say "Xi dada needs to step down and Li Keiqiang should have been Premier instead, and HK was never an integral part of China" it will get deleted on Sina, and if they really had it out for me prosecute me under NSL.
I can Google for Jan 6th photos without censorship. I cannot Baidu search photos of the Tiannamen square protests and subsequent massacre.
The freedom house index does have issues, but China is absolutely unfree.
Authoritarian states aren't completely unfree (it's organizationally impossible), but China is definetly fairly unfree compared to other authoritarian states like Russia or even Vietnam (though Vietnam is trending towards a more authoritarian future now that Tô Lâm is almost assured to be the next leader)
Students in the US are now getting their bodies hurt (not to mention the legal and career-ending consequences) by hundreds to thousands of policemen for the simple crime of protesting a genocide happening half-way around the globe, let's cut the charade, it doesn't help anyone.
No they're not. They're being removed by police for setting up encampments on private property. You can't just start setting up tents wherever you want on private land and taking over the area.
It might still be a bad idea to remove them, but if they were just doing standard protests in public areas, it'd be much less of an issue.
So you're saying the Chinese authorities were right in evacuating the Tiananmen Square, after all you cannot forcefully block public places without the proper authorization either. Like I said, let's cut the charade and look at the facts.
Absolute freedom exists nowhere.
Absolute unfreedom also exists nowhere.
Still, some places are more free than others. alephnerd made a number of comparisons of the US to China; you have refuted none of them. You merely complain that the US is not absolutely free of consequences for your actions. Well, that's true, but if that's what you're looking for, try an uninhabited island (and you may not even find it there).
Yea, and what does Chinese police do to protesters? Be it the White Paper protests in Shanghai and Beijing in 2022 [0], the wave of ethnic Mongol protests in 2020-21 [1], etc.
Police will inevitably crack down on protests everywhere, yet protests continue to happen on a daily basis in the US with minimal long term ramifications.
Also, none of what you pointed out actually refutes my points above about internet censorship, and as such clearly shows an attempt at whataboutism.
P.S. Both HRW [2] and Amnesty [3] have unequivocally voiced their support for the right to protest in the US, and as such if you try to say "oh human rights organizations are a tool of the west" it's complete bullshit.
[0] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/01/26/china-free-white-paper-p...
[1] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/3086/2020/en/
[2] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/26/us-universities-should-r...
[3] - https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/amnesty-internatio...
Wow, what a shocker. Next you're gonna tell me that the democracy indices people use come only from democracies.
You're equating "freedom" with "democracy", which as a far from established fact.
China isn't Marxist-Leninist - the CCP split from Marxist thinking and Comintern early in the PRC's history.
It's become it's own thing because anything "communist" is just lip service at this point. Public veneration of past Chinese empires and dynasties is way more common than some idealized view of a proletariat state.
Same with Vietnam (basically a crony capitalist country) and Laos (basically a buffer between Thailand, VN, and China where all three meddle)
You might want to edit Wikipedia's list of Marxist-Leninist states, in that case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Marxi...
Also the page on China, which states the government is a "Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd be interested to see how that edit would be received by other editors of the page.
It's basing "Marxist-Leninist" on national constitutions, which themselves are de facto useless when the Politburos in China, Vietnam, and Laos make drastic policy changes every decade (eg. 10 years ago it was expected for Chinese Premiers to step down after a 10 year term). Also, that list doesn't seem to actually link sources to assertions.
The CCP's charter calls itself "Marxist-Leninist" but every single "thought"/ideology pushed by the CCP's leadership when a new Premier arises is de facto diametric to Marxism-Leninism, and it has always been this case since Mao.
I recommend reading "The Chinese Reassessment of Socialism, 1976–1992" by Yan Sun , "A Nation-state by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism" by Suisheng Zhao, and "China: Development and Governance" by Yongian Zheng and Gunwu Wang if you want to actually understand the ideological underpinnings of Chinese governance.
I have Chinese language sources as well I'd recommend but that's a whole other issue.
Just like they taught all of us from elementary school to college - Wikipedia IS NOT a reliable source.
Wikipedia should always be used to spark conversations, but it is up to you to actually use Primary and Secondary sources to validate whether content on Wikipedia is valid or not.
Wikipedia as an editorial organization has a lot of issues, internal rivalries, and astroturfing (especially w/ regards to highly controversial topics such as Asian politics).
As such, it's best to use Primary and credible Secondary sources.
Thanks for the details. It is always interesting how the most innocent things are seen as danger by an autocracy.
For many years, the most accurate (paper) maps of the Soviet Union were those created by the CIA. The USSR's own maps included lots of intentionally incorrect data.
I remember from my childhood (early seventies is Soviet Union) that it was allowed to print road maps with straight lines only and distances between cities were always at least several kilometers wrong. I also remember when my classmate lost the map when orienteering (these were relatively accurate) and he and his parents had a lot of trouble because of that.
I believe back then you could only get orienteering maps from the military too.
Funny since the USSR spent quite a lot of effort making good maps of other countries.
Everything which is not allowed is forbidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbid...
That is a bit optimistic. China doesn’t really list what is allowed, it’s whatever they want to allow or forbid after the fact.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
Sir John Laws, nominative determinism in action.
Never had any issues. Noone cared about my camera while I was there. And I created like 5K photos there. Not that I ever use GPS, because it eats away your batter, but noone really cared about it.
If my memory is still correct, in China camera products must have their GPS module removed/disabled before they're licensed for sale. Since these products looked the same from the outside, and are commonly used by everyone who wants to, nobody will bother to check every single one.
Unless of course, if the camera gets too close to (say) a military/civil defense installation (often includes their office buildings), their security will probably do a check or just ask people to leave. They usually setup a sign near by to indicate "No trespassing" and maybe "No photographing" etc, just don't bring the camera over the line (I mean, better stay out completely if it says "No trespassing").
Most of the cameras do not have GPS module. And for some cameras like Canon 5D Mark IV [1], or 6D Mark II [2], they do have GPS even for Chinese market.
However, for the Camera which have GPS module, you will need additional filing to license your product. So some of the companies just hide the feature.
Clearly it is not "must have GPS removed".
[1] https://www.canon.com.cn/product/5dmk4/spec.html
[2] https://www.canon.com.cn/product/6dmk2/spec.html
That was completely from my memory, and I don't work in the industry, so my information/interpretation maybe inaccurate.
Thanks for the additional info.
In many products, there are different firmware or software loads for the PRC market (specifically PRC -- until recently not the HK versions) and the rest of the world. In some devices it's possible to lock satellite positioning to only Chinese constellation (BeiDou), or introduce error, or just not include positioning by default.
Of course, some of those devices get through, or are carried in by tourists, or are enabled by enthusiasts who load the non-China firmware. This seems to be understood. The Chinese are smart enough, one presumes, to know that actual state-level competitors can get accurate (in the chosen geodetic system) location data without relying on tourists' geotagged Google Photos uploads.
But that does lead to the question, "why, then?" -- if your adversaries know your secret, it's probably not worth the effort of protecting, anymore. (And why, in the US, we know about stuff like VENONA now.) The Chinese seem focused on a different threat: they don't care if a few people have good location data, even if some of them work for the US NGA, they just don't want everyone to have that data.
Which is interesting, because it suggests that that they're less concerned about a foreign government with strategic intelligence, than they are their own domestic population.
This isn't about state secrets vs other states; it's about denying their own population a capability that they find valuable, and thus threatening.
It's the commie way of "fixing" things to deter "enemies of the state": eastern radio bands, inaccurate maps, neighbour spy networks, serveral people on a landline so somebody can always listen, listening rooms for secret police inside state companies, heavily wiretaping citizens, continous party propaganda etc. Most of it is bs and it doesn't work or it's easy to circumvent, but one can never be too careful.
Those laws are there to be applied selectively.
When you are a nobody, they wont care. When you are a person of interest this law will be applied to you.
If they want you are just a tourist, otherwise you are a spy who took 5000 photos.
Never thought my camera being old enough to need a separate astrotracer GPS would have advantages.
The workaround might be to attach the GPS device to your dog's collar, as was done in Cuba by OpenStreetMappers
Doesn't say much about legality on paper, not even about how much of an invitation to selective enforcement it is, but looking at the Strava global heatmap through the lense of political systems is quite interesting: quite a bit of tracking in continental China, Cuba has more than Haiti. North Korea is a near-perfect blank, you can easily tell which islands belong to the south. The one spot where some tracking was registered is the ski resort they built in 2014 (apparently with a pre-used gondola system that i rode on when it was still in Ischgl). According to german wikipedia, a central excuse for building a ski resort was trying to attract tourists from China?
I love humans and the internet :)