Communications of the ACM
The Agnostic Cartographer
Picturesque but contentious: Google Maps made this village Chinese, temporarily. India wasnt pleased.
Annabelle Breakey
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.
Google rushed to admit its mistake, but not before a round of angry Indian blog posts and news articles had flourished online. Some commentators posited outright conspiracy between Beijing and the search engine. "Google Maps has always been more biased towards China over the Arunachal Pradesh border dispute," surmised an Indian blogger. Even more ominously, one former member of Parliament told the Times of India, "The Chinese know how to time their statements ahead of a bilateral meeting."
From Washington Monthly
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