Talk:Chinese civilization/Archive 1

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See Talk:China, Talk: China (Archive 1) and Talk: China (Archive 2) for recent discussions.

If you are interested in editing/creating articles related to China, the List of China related topics might help. olivier 07:06 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

Probably, most people that want to refer to the country People's Republic of China will link to this page, as China is the name by which it is commonly known. The "PR of" part is usually only added in formal use. As far as I can judge, most of the articles linking to China also intend to link to the PR (or perhaps the "old China") but few or none intend to link to the ROC, which is better known as Taiwan - that article is also located at Taiwan.

I propose to:

Jheijmans 07:12 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

My thought would be that there should be China article which would cover pre-revolutionary China, at the end (and at the beginning too) a short note about the division of the country with links to Taiwan and to Peoples Republic of China. My thinking is not at all based on politics but on the obvious fact that one can write lengthy articles on each of the 3 topics and an additional 3 on the history of each. Although one might make a new topic [[Pre-revolutionary China] but that seems awkward. User:Fredbauder

I think that is what the article is right now, or at least is supposed to be. However, I think it is rather fair to say that the history of the old China is included with the PR; it can be seen as it's successor. Taiwan will share a part of that history, but not all of it. Splitting up the history (and the rest) of one country because a (small) part of it has become independent (well, that's actually disputed) doesn't seem the way to go to me. Jheijmans

Thought a bit more about this. I think a general china article; then an article on each of the dynasties (and countries included within China such as Manchuria, Tibet, major provinces etc.). And of course a main article on the Peoples Republic of China with sections on such things as the long march, the cultural revolution, etc. The thing I'm thinking about is the size. We simply don't want another 300kb article which is what happens if you jam it all into one place. It won't load in lots of browsers and is hard to edit. I doubt wikipedia has been really discovered on the mainland, but if my experience on the New York Times China Forum is any guide there is a whole bunch of them and they can write volumes, expecially about China. I'm afraid wikipedia can expect a full bouquet of all 100 flowers once they get going. To address the split up of history, like in the case of European colonization of the Americas there is one general article then 4 major articles on British, French and Spanish colonization of the Americas then aricles on each historical region expored or colonized by the Spanish, like Spanish Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Yucatan etc. But there are also modern topics from each of those regions. Given that Chinese opinions diverge widely and also given the custom of making some contemporary point about the modern situation by refering to some obscure historical event a lot of fuss can be expected, its the size not "one China" that is a issue. User:Fredbauder

I propose a disambiguation page linking to:

  • China, the country with a history of thousands of years
  • People's Republic of China, recent government
  • Taiwan (or Republic of China), recent government

Each of the latter two (goverment) articles should mention the claims and counter-claims of legitimacy made by the rival regimes. Ed Poor

I'm not saying everything on China should be jammed in one page. Not even the history has to be jammed in one page. For example, the article on the Netherlands has a very brief history of the country. History of the Netherlands expands on that, mentioned more details, such as the First Anglo-Dutch War. This article in turn describes that war in much more detail, and mentions a number of battles, and a treaty signed in the end. Future articles on those topics can go into the details of that battle or treaty, etc., etc. (just as you pointed out about the colonisation thing).

Getting back to China, the point here is that I and ,I think, most other people would expect to find an article about China at China. And for me that means what is formally called the People's Republic of China. Like I don't expect to find the article on the Netherlands at Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the Netherlands article saying that it is a region in north-west europe, consisting of the current Kingdom of the Netherlands and Belgium, linking to those articles. Jheijmans 10:15 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

Perhaps the issue is that the name of a country makes a political statement about the legitimacy of the regime that currently rules it. Think about an article called Germany. I would expect something about the current borders and current government, of course, but mostly I'd like to know about the people who live there. Or maybe divided countries are a special case. Anyway, I'm sure you'll make the right decision. Ed Poor

The current organization of these China articles is rubbish! The PR of China should be at the conventional short form for that nation; China. This is how every other nation in wikipedia is, why is this one so different (well, the USofA does need to be moved to its short form too)? Hardly anybody in the world considers Taiwan to be the China except for Taiwanese and a handful of other nations. Therefore there is no reasonable ambiguity here. I wholeheartedly support Jheijmans' proposal and will do the work myself if needed. All we are doing by having this equal split is indicating that Taiwan has an equal claim to the mainland or that there is some significant ambiguity with the use of the word "China" - which there ain't. Sorry folks, even though I despise the government of the PR of China, possession is still nine tenths of the law. --mav

I don't think it's rubbish in the least. I think we should realize (as we did realize once upon a time) that it's often a very bad idea to have hard-and-fast rules that everyone must in every case adhere to. There are convenient exceptions that just make a lot more sense than blindly applying rules in every case.
In this case, the whole point is that "China," just like "Ireland" and a number of other place names, does not merely refer to a single political entity. You are assuming that the "nations," including their history, culture, language, etc.--which are certainly highly important as subjects for long encyclopedia articles--enjoy a one-to-one mapping to current political entities. Of course, that is simply not the case. Political divisions often do lead to very important national differences, but not always. Before 1990 I imagine you would have argued that "Germany" should refer only to what was then called West Germany. You'll notice that Korea, appropriately, does contain a history of Korea, though it should also contain information about the Korean language (right now it just has a link) as well as a history of the conflict between north and south, and a short history of north and south since the Korean War. Why is China treated differently? Not just because the PRC is by far the larger of the states, surely? --Larry Sanger

One issue I've forgotten about is the porcelain. I don't think we want a disambiguation page pointing to China (country) and china (porcelain). A page about china porcelain (is that a good term?) could however be linked from the bottom of the China article. Any other suggestions? Jheijmans 00:01 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)

No, not at the bottom but at the top in disamgibuation block format. I would suggest China (porcelain) or fine China which I think mean the same thing. --mav

Please please put China the country on the China page, and leave disambiguation for the very bottom. The term is not even close to being ambiguous. Possession is 9/10 of the law, indeed, and "fine China" owns less than 1/10 the usage of that word. --KQ



Possession is indeed 9/10 of the law BUT in wikipedia, we try to be as NPOV as possible. I'm pretty sure there are a diminishing number of hardliners who still think Taiwan is the Republic of China and we sure don't want to incite anger in them. My proposal is a combination of disambiguition-like paragragh followed by the article of the country. The whole page would look like this:

(starting with redirects)

The article accounting the country should be covering both governments.

China the country and china the porcelian don't need a disambiguation. China with the capital "C" is the country and porcelian has the lowercase "c". Nobody would write the country as china and doing so may be considered an insult to Chinese. Similar case in Turkey the country and turkey the bird. A link to the porcelian is good enough. Shame on folks who don't even bother typing the uppercase "C" while writing articles about the country. Ktsquare

A fair point, except that links are case-insensitive to the first letter. That is, china and China lead to the same page, so that won't help distinguish. My point was simply that I'd really rather not see the country (either country) and the porcelain disambiguated as if those two senses were equally common. --KQ

I now think we should do the following (accumulating my earlier thoughts and some responses):

  • Make China the article about the PR
  • Put in a notice at the top (disambiguation block format) with "see Taiwan or "Republic of China" (whichever you want) and the porcelain

In this way, almost all of the people linking (or following a link) to China still get what they expect; the rest can easily go the topics of Taiwan or porcelain. Jeronimo 03:45 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)

This seems reasonable to me. --mav

Redid the first paragraph modeling it after the Soviet Union page. User:Fredbauder

Added information about Taiwan. Not including that information makes causes extreme NPOV. While it is true that there are probably too few people who think that the Republic of China is the sole government of China, there are a *lot* of people who think that

Taiwan is part of China, and not including information on Taiwan is like linking Korea to only South Korea.

-- User:Roadrunner

OK, I'm going in to make the changes I proposed (there were no further objections). There have been some changes to the pages, I'll try to keep them as I shuffle. Jeronimo 23:26 Jul 31, 2002 (PDT)

Whoa......

By identifying the PRC with China and moving the Taiwan information off, you are running into serious NPOV issues here. Basically anyone from the PRC is going to object to Taiwan not being included in the China heading, and about 40% of the people on Taiwan are also going to object for different reasons.

The notion that the ROC is the sole government of China is can be viewed as a fringe notion, but the notion that Taiwan is part of either a cultural unit known as China or part of the People's Republic of China has enough people supporting it that it shouldn't be excluded.

-- User:Roadrunner

Made some modifications. Basically if you make any simplifications you will upset someone so in true Wikipedia spirit, I think the best thing to do is to describe the controversy. The thing to keep in mind about the status of Taiwan is that it is *deliberately* kept unclear and confusing because any clarity will result in people shooting each other. -- User:Roadrunner

Roadrunner, could you give your objections next time before I make a move? I think this is not against NPOV issues, as discussed above. I agree that the disambiguation header was maybe a little short. Please read the above discussion as well...
I think Roadrunner was 100% correct to make the change. --Larry Sanger

My objections are as follows:

1) The problem is that while almost no one still seriously believes that the ROC is the legitimate government of all of China, the position that China refers to the PRC and excludes Taiwan is objectionable (for different reasons) to about 90% of the people in the PRC and about 30 to 70% (depending on how you phrase the question) of people on Taiwan.

2) The Republic of China existed before the move to Taiwan and even though it might be synonymous with Taiwan in 2002, it didn't include Taiwan at all in 1920.

I wouldn't object if the article doesn't make the equation PRC=China and included discussion on the status of Taiwan and then a link.

-- User:Roadrunner

Yes, but we're making an English-language encyclopedia. For them (and for most other language I speak (Dutch, French, German, Swedish) or know of) China refers to the PRC in the first place. Second is the porcelain, and only third is Taiwan (if at all). Given Wikipedia:Naming conventions, this means we should put the article about the PRC here. For those that come here and expect any of the other meanings of China (a minority), we place a link to the other articles. This should mention something more than it did some minutes ago, but it should be there. If all those Chinese people you mention are reasonable, they will see that the situation is confusing and that there's no way to solve it with encyclopedia articles if it cannot be solved in real life.

As for the Republic of China, two solutions are possible there. I didn't know the RoC was also used in the post-imperial time, but it was, as you mention. Since both uses seem to be equally valid, we might consider making a disambiguation page out of that page or maybe, because Taiwan already has it's own article, mention at the top or bottom that RoC is used as the official name for Taiwan. Jeronimo

It is simply and straightforwardly wrong to say that, in English, "China" means the PRC. No, it doesn't. In English, the word is highly ambiguous. Sometimes, people mean the PRC plus Taiwan (and their unified history, culture, language(s), etc.). Sometimes, people admittedly do mean the PRC, but that's only when the context is clear. Insofar as the decision to make the China article about the PRC was based on this false assumption, I think it was a mistake. --Larry Sanger

The problem here is that most English speakers don't know that much about Chinese politics or the China/Taiwan issue which is why they come to an encyclopedia in the first place. I really think that there are serious NPOV problems if you arrange the article China in a way that most Chinese find objectionable even if they are not English speakers.


OK, Roadrunner, what about this: My proposal remains the same, but in the header of the article we add a link to a page where the China naming issues is addressed.

The main problem is not pointing China to Taiwan and there isn't really a necesscity to put a disambiguation link to Taiwan from China. The problem is arranging the article so that it takes no position on whether Taiwan is or is not part of China and whether China is or is not synomous with the PRC.


--- User:Roadrunner


What about this.......

  • Point PRC to China
  • Point ROC to its own article which points to Taiwan
  • Include a intro paragraph which reads like it does now and include a explanation of the status of Taiwan with a link to Taiwan.
  • Change the map to indicate Taiwan's disputed status
  • Include the flag of both PRC and Republic of China (which was the flag of all of China before 1949).

--- User:Roadrunner


What about now?

--- User:Roadrunner


Several of us have already gone over this and decided to do exactly what Jeronimo and Fred did. The status issue is important the both nations so a short lead-in paragraph should be in both China and Taiwan and the full text should be in a separate article that is linked from both of the lead-ins. --mav

I concur. Jeronimo
I don't concur. Roadrunner had one possible solution, but arguably a better solution would be to make China about the civilization of China and all that entails, and then put the articles about the modern political states under their proper names. Isn't this the obvious solution? --Larry Sanger
With the exception of the map and the flag, I'm happy with the way the

article is. The important things here are....

1) The link go from PRC -> China (main article) and not China -> PRC 2) The sublinks be labelled as information about Mainland China and not China.

I think that if I argue at this point, I'll just make things more confusing.

OK, to stop the confusion indeed, I propose the following to solve that: I will make a page at China/Temp (or anybody can do that in fact), where we work out the exact text - we can also apply the WikiProject Countries template at the same time. In that way, there's no trouble with the article while we work this out together. Jeronimo

That sounds fine. One thing to keep in mind here is that there enough landmines here that seemingly subtle things can set people off while things that seem like they would cause screaming fights actually don't.

Fortunately enough formulas and clever wording can be found to keep people from shooting each other or worse yet throwing nukes at each other so wording a wikipedia article should be simple. (You can just imagine the amount of screaming there is in writing history textbooks in Taiwan.)

User:Roadrunner '

To finish my "summary" of the China/Temp edit: attempt at writing of a disclaimer (I think it's too long, but I can't see what to leave out, if anything), apply WikiProject Countries format first step. Jeronimo 23:41 Aug 1, 2002 (PDT)

First, the table you have does not display well in Netscape. Getting the sidebar to the right beging over written on the table. Netscape 4.7 under windows 95.

Second, this paragraph:

The name China is claimed by two countries, the 'People's Republic of China and the Republic of China', better known as Taiwan. The People's Republic claims Taiwan is a separatist province, while Taiwan claims independence and the use of the name China. Since the name "China" in English language almost always refers to the People's Republic, that is the topic of this page. See Taiwan and china (porcelain)? for more information on those topics and One China policy for more information on the issue surrounding the name China.

I don't like it, but hard to say just why. I guess one thing is that China exists seperate from the claims of the governments. The other is that Taiwan does not claim independence. This, in fact, is part of the delicate dance the two governments. engage in; the PRC does not invade Taiwan so long as Taiwan does not declare independence. In the past the Republic of China claimed to be the government of all China. They seem to have dropped that so not sure they could be said to claim the name China.

About the displaying of the table - please submit a bug report, although I think it is a bug of Netscape 4.7 (it looks good in NS 6.1).
As for the paragraph text: feel free to edit it, or propose new wording, especially if the factual information is incorrect! Jeronimo
I've changed the stuff in China/Temp we should discuss it there.

I thought it was agreed that the article would be about the PRC, with a clear header explaining the situation. Although the text I put down may have been wrong, that concept has totally vanished right now. Why? Jeronimo

I don't recall agreeing to that. User:Roadrunner

The article on China should be about well .... China.

Exactly! And in English language, that means the PRC. All English language encyclopedias and dictionaries will confirm that. And Wikipedia is also an English language encyclopedia. People that look up China expect the article to be about that country that is officially called PRC. Like I said before, the article about the Netherlands doesn't tell you it is a "historic region" in which the present countries the "Kingdom of the Netherlands" and the "Kingdom of Belgium" are located. Jeronimo

It's a matter of logic, not language. "China" does not necessarily mean PRC, for the obvious reason that when we say things like, "In 7th century A.D., the Tang Dynasty ruled China."

It is absolutely priceless (for non-English speakers, this means "uproariously funny") that the current article bills itself as being about "People's Republic of China" and then in the very next paragraph begins "China was one of the earliest centers of human civilization"--which makes it sound as if the PRC has been around for as long as civilization itself. No, China has been around as long as civilization itself perhaps. If we really wanted to make this article about the PRC, we would begin the history of the PRC at the beginning of the history of the PRC.

I hope it's clear that I'm not at all denying that when we speak about modern China, we mean the PRC. Of course that's right. But this is an encyclopedia. People are coming here for information not just about the modern political divisions of the world.

China has been around for a lot longer than the PRC; the PRC is just one chapter in the history of China, just as the division between Northern Ireland and the Republic is just one chapter in the long history of Ireland. That's why we should make Ireland about Ireland, the whole kit and kaboodle (that means, everything), not just the modern state. --Larry Sanger

Most English speakers have these sorts of expectation not because they know anything about Chinese politics, but because of the way the rest of the world works. Most countries are nice neat pigeon-holed one country is ruled by one government with a short name and a long name.

The problem is that China is a special case because if you try to apply that to the Chinese situation, atom bombs go off and people die. So the way people have prevented a war is to *intentionally* make the situation ambigious. It's maddening for mapmakers and encyclopedia article writers but that's really a small price to pay for preventing world war III.

Because China is a special case where the diplomats have played with the concept of the nation state to prevent a major war, the encyclopedia article should also be a special case.

--- User:Roadrunner

What about an article on Korea? Or a pre-1991 article on Germany? Or a pre-1975 on Vietnam?

There would be lots of people terribly offended if you point an article on Korea only to South Korea.

--- User:Roadrunner

Oh come on, are you seriously claiming that encyclopedia articles will set of a World War? Well then, we'd better warn the for a nuclear attack then, since there are 100s of encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference books and maps in dozens of languages that say China = PRC.

The nice thing about Korea is that nobody automatically identifies Korea with North or South, or (formerly) Germany with East or West. However, that IS the case for China. Jeronimo

No matter what the situation is in English, if you structure the article in a way that most Chinese find offensive then you have serious NPOV problems.


If you make the identification PRC=China and exclude Taiwan from the PRC, you pretty much everyone in the PRC and about 40% of the people on Taiwan. You make about 40% of the people on Taiwan really happy.

If you make the identification PRC=China and include Taiwan, then you make most people in the PRC happy but you offend pretty much everyone in Taiwan.

The best course of action is what the diplomats do and take no position on whether PRC=China and explain why.

User:Roadrunner

NPOV is not about not offending anybody.

The fact is that most people in the (English speaking) world think that Paris is in France may upset the few inhabitants of Paris, Texas - but that does not mean the article should be about the both. The China situation is - from Wikipedia's name giving point - no different.

If the people of China or Taiwan are offended by one encyclopedia article, well they should be really p*ssed off about those 5,000,000,000 that associate China with the PRC. Jeronimo

But there is something seriously wrong if an article on China offends most Chinese.

Also, people in Mainland China and Taiwan *ARE* that emotionally attached to this issue, and this issue is a *major* irritant in PRC-United States relations. If the United States Department of State published an official document which identified China with PRC and excluded Taiwan, then we'd be looking at a diplomatic crisis possibly leading to a major nuclear war. That's why the Taiwan entry in the CIA fact book is in a special appendix and not between Syria and Tanzania, and the United States government is very very careful to not officially refer to Taiwan as a nation.

User:Roadrunner

If the CIA were so careful about this issue, then WHY is there an entry called "China" which is about the PRC? Taiwan IS separately mentioned in the article as claiming the Spratley Islands, so it is certainly not part of the PRC there... Do I call George, or will you? Jeronimo
Because the way the CIA fact book words it, you can

interpret it as PRC=China, Taiwan is part of PRC which makes the PRC happy. You can also interpret it so that it isn't.

That trick probably wouldn't work in Wikipedia because the US is basically ignoring Taiwan in this situation. You

  • can* write the article that way which would make the

PRC very happy, but would tick off everyone in Taiwan, and it wouldn't reflect the fact that the PRC doesn't have administrative control over Taiwan.

User:Roadrunner


By the way, I don't have an objection to most of the article on China being about the PRC. What I'm asking for is to phrase the introduction to make it clear that the identification between PRC=China isn't universially accepted. China is a nation and the PRC is a particular government of that nation.

Also, keep in mind that the PRC didn't exist in 1750 while China did.

User:Roadrunner

So then, why not accept the previously proposed format, with a short introductory paragraph and the rest about the PRC? There may have been incorrect information in that paragraph I wrote, but you can simply correct that. Jeronimo
The main problem was that the paragraph was factually

incorrect and didn't get to the heart of the controversy. See the talk:China/Temp for more details. Once you figure out the heart of the controversy (which is about Taiwan and not really about the PRC), the article can be made much simpler.

What I was proposing was an intro paragraph saying

(China) is (blah, blah, blah). Mainland China is administered by the People's Republic of China. Taiwan is a special case described in a separate article.

(most of the sublinks *aren't* affected by the controversy the only ones that are are those on politics and military. military should point to PLA anyway).

The map and the flag might be problems but they can be dealt with after the text is set.

-- User:Roadrunner

Go ahead and rewrite the paragraph, but I'd propose to make it bold or italic, so that the reader can easily separate it from the main article about the PRC, which should normally include the flag and map, since they're maps of the PRC. The map should be replace, btw, but only because this one is partly in Polish language... Jeronimo

The problem I had with the paragraph is that it seems to be overkill. At this point pretty much no one in Taiwan (or anywhere else) challenges the authority of the government of the PRC to rule the Mainland and so that any article on China is going to be about 95% about the PRC. Given that situation it seems to be the simplest thing to make the article 95% about the PRC and then add the 5% controversy over Taiwan in the article rather than having a special paragraph at the beginning.

I don't think that anyone would object if an article about China is 95% about the PRC. The objection is making the article 100% about the PRC and excluding Taiwan.

I'm curious why you find the format

China is a country in East Asia. (blah, blah, blah) The government of Mainland China is currently the People's Republic of China. Taiwan is a special case with its own article.

(and then the rest of the article is going to be 95% about the PRC or pre-PRC China)

to be objectionable. If nothing else it complies with the wikipedia convention of putting the title word in bold. Also on historical grounds it doesn't make sense to make the article focus on the PRC, and then talk about the Tang dynasty.

Part of the problem here is to be clear about what the controversy is. It isn't what it was 15 years ago.

-- User:Roadrunner

I think this quote is right on, "So the way people have prevented a war is to *intentionally* make the situation ambigious." We are not responsible to follow exactly Chinese etiquette but an introduction which leave somethings unsaid (as in the article china is better than one that clarifies and makes manifest the contradictions. Fred Bauder

Like I said before, I prefer the format I entered earlier this day, because that is according to the Wikipedia standards. And I would really press to see that format again. Jeronimo