China ‘grabs’ Arunachal, on iPhone map

The ‘war of maps’ between India and China is now being waged on a new battlefield — on the Google Map functionality of iPhone 4, Apple’s newest smart phone that has taken China by storm.

Tens of thousands of people in Chinese cities, who have procured iPhone 4 since it was launched on Saturday, will learn from the map function that the area that Indians know as Arunachal Pradesh is entirely Chinese territory.

That is in line with China’s territorial claims over the entire state, which it refers to as “southern Tibet”, which is under Indian administration.

Similarly, Aksai Chin, which is a disputed territory in Jammu & Kashmir, which is under Chinese control, is depicted entirely as Chinese territory.

And the islands in the East China Sea at the centre of a Sino-Japanese dispute in recent weeks, and the entire stretch of the South China Sea that Beijing controversially claims as its, are all shown as Chinese territory.

“The built-in map application on iPhone 4s sold in mainland China is crippled,” Beijing-based amateur cartographer and technologist Stefan Geens, who bought his latest gizmo in Beijing, told DNA.

“The phone’s base map is hard-wired to Google Maps’ censored data set for China, where the depiction of China’s borders complies with the official propaganda of the Chinese government.”

The ‘map app’ on earlier generations of the iPhone, when used in China, too depicted maps that complied with Chinese law (showing Arunachal as part of China and so on), but they came with one crucial override function. Using software to scale the Chinese internet ‘firewall’, iPhone users could access the same maps that the rest of the world sees.

But with iPhone 4, the Map app always shows China’s borders as the Chinese government would have them, “regardless of whether or not I use virtual private networks” to scale China’s firewall, notes Geens.    

Even if I take this phone to the US or Europe, it will show the same crippled, semi-fictional base map - and there’s no way I can change it!”

But Geens, who blogs (at ogleearth.com) about how “neo-geographical tools” like Google Earth influence geopolitics, points out that India too plays similar cartographic games.

“On iPhones sold in India, the base map shows Jammu & Kashmir as wholly India, without acknowledging the Line of Control.” Or the fact that Aksai Chin is disputed territory under Chinese control.

Such maps in India and China, “which don’t really reflect reality on the ground”, reflect the “propaganda of the respective governments,” says Geens. But the reason Google has different base maps for India and China is that it wants to do business in both countries, and it perhaps reckons that this is a “lesser evil” than not providing the map app at all, he reasons.

It is, of course, possible for iPhone users to get around the map app’s limitations by loading generic maps on a web browser (by using a VPN, in China’s case).

But the iPhone 4s sold in mainland China come with another downside: names of cities and roads, even in other countries, are listed in Chinese, and in some cases, no names are displayed at all.