Chinese Mythomania

China’s ignorance about its own maps created a false history of its ancient role in South Africa

By Khanya Mtshali

"The creation of the Milky Way" by Guo Xu (1456–c.1529). 

In 2002, the South African parliament hosted an exhibition as part of the “Parliamentary Millennium Project” held in Cape Town. 

Launched by Frene Ginwala, former speaker of parliament, the project was designed “to contrast European perspectives with indigenous ones,” and “promote the recognition of shared South African identities.”
At the centerpiece of the event was a map gifted to South Africa by the People’s Republic of China. The “Da Ming Hunyi Tu” is an amalgamated illustration of the Great Ming empire. 

The bottom of the map shows an early depiction of an east African coast (now present-day Tanzania).The Korean version of the “Da Ming Hunyi Tu” from 1402.

The “Da Ming Hunyi Tu” at the exhibition was a 1402 Korean copy of the original, estimated to date back to 1389. 

Much fanfare was made about the possibilities of Chinese presence on the continent prior to the arrival of Europeans. 

Liu Guijin, China’s former ambassador for African Affairs, stated in a Q&A on the embassy’s website that the map proved that “friendly exchanges between China and Africa” went “back to ancient times.” 

He used admiral Zheng He’s expeditions along the east African coast (now Somalia and Kenya) as an example of a “time-honored” and “friendly” relationship between China and Africa.
But according to cartographer, Alexander Akin, the idea of age-old Sino-African relations is based on a conflation of historical facts related to the “Da Ming.” 

In his paper, “The Da Ming Hunyi Tu: Repurposing a Ming Map for Sino-African Diplomacy,” he argues that the depiction of an east African coast most likely derives from Middle Eastern observations of the continent. 

He lays out two possible origins of the map. 

The one cites the work of Japanese cartographic historian, Takahashi Tadashi. 

In 1963, Tadashi published “Eastward diffusion of Islamic world maps in the medieval era.” 

In it, he speculated that the “Da Ming” was based on the description of a globe given to Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan, by Persian astronomer, Jamal ad-Din in 1267. 

The other source is the sailing guides taken from Muslim mariners by the Yuan government in 1287.Abraham Ortelius’s map of Africa, minutes away from being colonized by three ships on the brink of crashing into one another. Marginal improvement from the last map. 

“Traders from the Middle East were certainly moving between northeastern Africa and China well over 1,200 years ago,” says Akin in an email. 

In terms of trade and diplomacy, he said “a small number of African slaves” were “imported from Zanzibar to the court” during the Tang dynasty (618 – 907 CE).
For people who haven’t studied advanced Chinese history, Akin said it’d be easy “to assume that a Chinese map that depicts Africa in the Ming dynasty must have something to do with [Zheng He’s] missions.” 

He also attributed historical ignorance and Sinocentric assumptions for the misrepresentation of the “Da Ming” as evidence of early Sino-African exchanges.
While China’s ignorance is the result of cultural bias and human error, the repurposing of the “Da Ming” helped calm anxieties about growing Chinese presence in South Africa. 

After years of condescension and prejudice soon after the end of Apartheid, South Africa has since come to embrace Chinese investment in the country, as citizens remain uncertain of what to make of China in the midst of an unsteady economy, the Gupta leaks, and a British PR company stoking racial tensions.This 1829 map of the East African coast caused all this confusion. 

The “Da Ming Hunyi Tu” enabled China to play to the anti-imperialist and pan-African sentiments in the country. 

By leaning on its support of struggle organizations such as the Pan Africanist Congress and African National Congress (while being oblivious of the African slaves brought to China during the Tang dynasty), the country was able to reassure South Africans that unlike Europe, its relations with Africa would be defined by mutual benefit and comradeship.

Cartographic Rape

Han Megalomania: China Just Claims Hawaii (and Most of the Pacific Ocean)
By Harry J. Kazianis

Even though the map and article were someone’s attempt at a little fun, there is a larger point. China’s use of maps, passports and other mapfare-style methods of pushing a narrative of rightful territorial claims whether over Taiwan or the 9 or actually 10-dash-line in the South China Sea and others areas has been part of Beijing’s toolkit for sometime now. 

The fact that none of us at the conference were shocked speaks volumes to the now ingrained perception of China on the international stage as a power bent on changing the status-quo—no matter what the cost. 

A reputation as some sort of rogue state is a tough thing in international politics to change—and it's something Beijing should bear in mind.
The neverending ups and downs of what is quickly becoming the hottest geostrategic flashpoint on the planet, none other than the South China Sea, was the subject of a conference at Yale University this last May. 

Panels were filled with world-class experts promoting their latest research (including yours truly) detailing the various claims, counterclaims and strategic challenges surrounding this important body of water. 

And yet, it wasn’t the heated Q&A sessions or slick powerpoints that drove debate among the attendees, but rumors of China’s latest territorial claims—a 251 dash-line that extends over almost all of the Pacific Ocean—that created the most buzz.

According to a ‘report’ on the website Elitereaders, a ‘clicky’ website that reports ‘viral’-styled news, Beijing is now claiming Hawaii and most of Micronesia. 

Delegates to the conference furiously began to share the article through various social media channels. 

Red-faced attendees were debating the nature of such claims as soon as they scanned the article. Many wondered if this was simply a negotiating strategy on Beijing’s part, a carefully crafted ploy to make equally outrageous claims in the South China Sea look meager by comparison—claiming massive chunks of the Pacific Ocean would sort of do that.
From there, things got even more interesting. 

On the sidelines of the conference, a Vietnamese filmmaker was shooting a documentary on the South China Sea and asked me on camera what I thought of the claims. 

Without being able to do any in depth reading or fact-checking the piece, I expressed hope the report would be proven untrue, but if somehow Beijing was bold enough to make such a claim, it would only go further to cement the narrative as China becoming an international bully—taking the concept of what I referred to as ‘Mapfare’ to a whole new level.
The text of the article is interesting to say the least:
“In a move expected to escalate global tensions, China’s Ministry of Education has released a new world map in which China claims large swaths of the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii and most of Micronesia.
According to Xinhua, the Education Ministry also issued a directive ordering “all educational facilities and government offices to replace their outdated world maps with the current iteration.”
Though the United States has yet to offer any comment, Micronesian President Manny Mori has called the map “absurd” and accused China of “cartographic rape.”
It goes on—and where it all falls apart as a poorly-timed comedic ruse:
“China’s new territory also encompasses Mexico’s Clarion Island and France’s Clipperton Island, which officials say will be allowed full autonomy. 

American possessions in the region, however, will be combined to form Xinmeiguo Province.
China’s new neighbors will almost certainly raise questions about the map’s legitimacy and protest the country’s expanded borders. 

Indeed, China’s previous “nine-dash map,” which included the contested Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, was already a source of controversy.
But Ministry of Education officials defended the new “251-dash map” by pointing to several Qing-era documents which show the Caroline, Northern Mariana and Marshall Islands under Chinese control.
“The study of what constitutes Chinese territory is ongoing,” said one ministry official.
At press time, proof had been found that the Ming Empire once controlled a large portion of Antarctica. 

The Ministry of Education said it would immediately begin production of a new, revised map.”
Only reading the open paragraphs—and certainly before taking a more detailed look at article—
I assumed like many of my colleagues at the conference it could very well be possible. 

Heck, if China has the guts to try to make a case for claims on Okinawa, why not go all in? 

Call it ‘mapfare’ on steroids.
But as I let the shock and horror subside and read on I realized we all had been had—thank god.
Besides the obvious hysterics like new provinces and claims over Antarctica, in just a matter of a few minutes of Googling I realized the article was not an original piece but was actually written in 2014 for a site called Ministry of Harmony. 

Described on its Twitter feed as “The Onion with Chinese Characteristics” it seems we had all been had—at least for a little while anyway.
Even though the map and article were someone’s attempt at a little fun, there is a larger point. 

China’s use of maps, passports and other mapfare-style methods of pushing a narrative of rightful territorial claims whether over Taiwan or the 9 or actually 10-dash-line in the South China Sea and others areas has been part of Beijing’s toolkit for sometime now. 

The fact that none of us at the conference were shocked speaks volumes to the now ingrained perception of China on the international stage as a power bent on changing the status-quo—no matter what the cost. 

A reputation as some sort of rogue state is a tough thing in international politics to change—and it's something Beijing should bear in mind.

Death by a thousand cuts: software development behind China’s Great Firewall

By Eva Xiao

If you’ve ever been to mainland China, chances are you’re familiar with the Great Firewall, the country’s all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. 

You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. 

But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away – at least temporarily.
For software developers based in China, however, it’s not that simple. 

You’re not just censored from certain websites. 

Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach. 

With software services and libraries spread across the globe, China’s internet sovereignty can be a real pain in the ass.
“There’s a whole parallel universe over here,” DC Collier, founder of Shanghai-based chatbot startup Rikai Labs, told me back in June. 

“I think Chinese developers are doing development work with one hand tied behind their back.”
DC has been a software developer for 20 years, building everything from CD-ROM games to Facebook apps and now, chatbots. 

When I ask how he deals with the Great Firewall, he says he travels overseas when he has a couple weeks of “serious coding work” ahead of him.
“Otherwise, just bang my head against the wall,” he tells Tech in Asia in an email.
To outsiders who have never developed software in China, it might sound like he’s joking. 

But he’s not.

Blocked – or slow as hell
The scope of the Great Firewall has grown along with the internet. 

Sadly, it’s a highly adaptable and robust system. 

In terms of software development, it means that a growing number of services are permanently or sporadically blocked.
One of those is NPM or Node Package Manager, an important tool for Node.js. 

To access NPM in mainland China, you’ll have to find workarounds like using a Chinese mirror. Another is Github, a popular version control and source code management tool that is occasionally blocked or at least throttled to be excruciatingly slow.
Things get worse when you try using anything related to Google: Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps. 

All blocked. 

Even open source tools from Google are inaccessible without VPN or some kind of detour, such as Tensorflow.
“We had to rewrite so much of our stack,” says DC. 

“In the US, you rely on so many external libraries but then every time you do a deploy here, it takes like 30 minutes because it’s pulling down libraries from someone else’s service. You have to set up all kinds of infrastructure to get around all of that stuff.”
“If you’re using third party APIs, like Facebook’s natural language processing APIs, you have to set up proxies to bounce that stuff around,” he adds. 

“It’s really painful.”
If you’re an Android developer and plan to develop for Google Play, be prepared to cry rivers of tears when you try to use Google’s Android services. 

Expect to wait hours to upload your app to the Play Store because your VPN is broken.
“Android’s system has some services, like push notifications and the Play Store and Google Maps. You can’t use any of them in China,” says Xin Qi, technical director at Ming Labs. 

When Xin Qi and his team make apps for the users both within and outside of China, they have to check the user’s location in order to use the right service.
“Our apps will have some deviation,” he continues. 

“When we get a GPS location, it’s 100 or so meters off. In China, there’s a GPS offset.” 

He’s referring to GCJ-02, a China-specific GPS coordinate system that will erroneously shift WGS-84 markers, such as GPS locations, on maps.
“When we retrieve coordinates, we have to fix them,” he sighs. 

“It’s not hard but it’s annoying.”

Hosting dilemmas
Unfortunately, the Great Firewall is only one piece of the Chinese internet. 

Even if you get around the blocked services, you might encounter problems endemic to the whole ecosystem.
A good example is web hosting. 

Alex Michaud, founder of Reddoor.House, a service that helps expats find housing, has struggled to find the right server to host his website. 

Cloud services in China are more expensive than their equivalents in the West, and exorbitantly so, he says.
“It’s not like two, three times more,” he says. 

“It’s like 100 times more expensive.”
For instance, though Alibaba Cloud’s basic Elastic Cloud Service package is roughly US$10 a month, it offers a measly bandwidth of 1 Mbps. 

Compare that to Linode, a cloud service based in the US, whose US$10 basic package comes with a bandwidth of 125 Mbps. 

To get something equivalent from Alibaba Cloud, you would have to pay around US$1,500 a month.
Things get more complicated when you want to service users both inside and outside of China. 

If you’re targeting the local market, it makes sense to use a data center based in China. 

But if you also want to serve the international market, you might need to pay more for a specialized service.
“Even though we also have users in Canada [and] Australia, 85 percent of our business is done in China,” says Gabriel Paquin, vice president of engineering at Education International Cooperation (EIC) Group, a counseling service provider for Chinese students who want to study abroad.
EIC uses Salesforce as its CRM system. 

It’s hosted in Japan though, because Salesforce doesn’t have a data center in China.
To circumvent that, EIC subscribes to Aryaka, a software-defined WAN service, which optimizes enterprise networks such as content delivery networks (CDNs).
“I do enterprise. We’re a big business,” says Gabriel. 

“I cannot hack a couple of Python libraries and it’s gonna be cool. Our business is a billion RMB business, it’s not small. […] I gotta go with enterprise services.”
Still, even with Aryaka, there’s no guarantee that the company’s CDN will work seamlessly. 

Gabriel and his development team have to ensure that sales apps running on company devices, such as tablets, can operate offline if they have to. 

The sales team cannot afford to wait for web pages to load when they are trying to close sales, he says.
“It has to be fast,” says Gabriel. 

“For example, let’s look at information from Harvard University. It would take forever to load. So for some of the key pages, we had to have a local cache on the device.”
Because so much data has to be saved locally, EIC has to buy devices with larger hard drives, he says. Thankfully, it’s an internal application.

No hope?
When I ask Zhang Wei, a senior developer at Ming Labs, what advice he would give overseas software developers that want to enter China, he says without hesitation, 

“Don’t come.”
“You’ll lose access to a lot of good services,” he explains. 

When you’re troubleshooting software, you’ll always have some doubts, he says. 

“You won’t know if it’s the VPN or the network connection. Sometimes it won’t work without VPN, and sometimes it won’t work with VPN.”
It’s hard to quantify how much productivity is lost as a result of troubleshooting and working around the Great Firewall. 

DC estimates that 50 percent of his productivity is lost, while Alex only describes it as hours and hours of lost time. 

“All the time you spend on those little problems […] it’s time that you don’t spend developing your product,” he says.
Ironically, the Chinese government wants the country to become a world leader in technology and innovation. 

At the same time, restrictions around freedom of speech are tightening and even VPNs are not guaranteed workarounds for the country’s rising Great Firewall.
The only advice I heard from developers was to keep things as local as possible – similar to Gabriel and his team – and to avoid anything with external resources. 

And when possible, use Chinese services.
Alex has lived in Shanghai for two years now. 

When he just moved to China in 2014, he felt optimistic about the country. 

It was developing fast and it felt more exciting than Canada’s tech scene, which he describes as conservative. 

At that time, he was sure that China’s internet restrictions would loosen over time. 

In hindsight, he was naive, he says.
“In China, you can really feel the frontier,” he says. 

“It’s the biggest intranet in the world.”