think on this.

One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic. The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.

Within China, Geens pointed out, the law commands that all maps represent “South Tibet” (aka Arunachal Pradesh) as fully Chinese. And Google Maps maintains servers in China that fall under Chinese law. In fact, Google runs an entirely separate maps site, ditu.google.cn, for Chinese users, which operates within the great Chinese firewall. This isn’t just a one-off concession to the party leaders in Beijing: Google maintains thirty-two different region-specific versions of its Maps tool for different countries around the world that each abide by the respective local laws. Thus on India’s version of Google Maps, for example, all of Kashmir appears as an integral and undisputed part of the country—because Indian law sees it that way. Similarly, “Arunachal Pradesh” is nowhere to be found on ditu.google.cn. What you find instead are all the same Chinese place-names that caused the uproar of Google Maps in August.