Well, they were incorrect. So PRC customs officers in Shandong seized 60,000 maps that had been export-bound for “mislabeling” Taiwan and other cartographic sins (BBC, October 15, 2025).
Exactly how the island was mislabeled has not been revealed in so many words, but presumably it was represented as independent rather than as a province of the mainland. According to the People’s Republic of China, which has never governed Taiwan, Taiwan, a part of the Republic of China, is really already a part of the PRC, and the two need merely to be “reunited.”
Another grievance: “omission” of certain important islands in the South China Sea. This complaint is not very specific as reported either, but perhaps the missing islands are indeed there on the maps but lack CCP-preferred names.
A third: “China Customs said that the maps also did not contain the nine-dash line, which demarcates Beijing’s claim over nearly the entire South China Sea.”
The map-seizing by PRC customs officers who double as proofreaders has happened before.
The confiscation of “problematic maps” by Chinese customs officers is not uncommon—though the number of the maps seized in Shandong easily eclipses past seizures. Goods that fail inspection at the customs are destroyed.
In March, customs officers at an airport in Qingdao seized a batch of 143 nautical charts that contained “obvious errors” in the national borders.
In August, customs officers in Hebei province seized two “problematic maps” that, among other things, contained a “misdrawing” of the Tibetan border.
The belligerence about maps parallels the Chinese Communist Party’s belligerence in the mapped waters of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea; especially, in the latter case, in the waters near the Philippines, where “tensions…flare up occasionally.” BBC reports that about a week ago, “ships from China and the Philippines figured in another encounter.”
It seems that once again there is no way of knowing who was the instigator. “Manila accused a Chinese ship of deliberately ramming and firing its water cannon at a Philippine government vessel. But Beijing said the incident happened after the Philippine vessel ignored repeated warnings and ‘dangerously approached’ the Chinese ship.”
