Re: Adding RAINBOW FLAG to Unicode (Fwd: Representing Additional Types of Flags)

From: Mark Davis ☕️ <mark_at_macchiato.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2015 07:16:41 +0200

*​Please take political discussions elsewhere; they do not belong on this
list.*

The point about the boundaries of regions changing over time, and flags
being associated with a former set of boundaries could have been made in a
few sentences. Not only would it have avoided politics, it would have been
more likely that people would actually read it (the likelihood being
inversely proportional to the length).

Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 4:12 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> And today's Chinese province ofTibet is different from the historic Tibet,
> as China incorporated other surrounding areas, including some parts taken
> from Bhutan (a small part around Legaru, and a larger part to the North)
> and India (some parts to the West from states of Jammu and Kashmir, which
> itself is also claimed by Pakistan, and of Uttarakhand, and to the East
> from Arunachal Pradesh), as well as modifying the internal borders of
> Chinese provinces of Xinjiang in the nort-west and of Sichuan on the east.
> The whole new province is still named Tibet but much larger than the
> historic country of Tibet before its annexion.
>
> The Chinese claims in India and Bhutan are contested and is still subject
> to very active military tensions with India. This question is then more
> important than only the Tibetan free movement that does not claim anything
> to India and Bhutan (and in fact these two countries are hosting Tibetan
> refugees and the Free Tibet movement itself) and do not claim anything in
> Chinese parts previously part of Sichuan and Xinjiang provinces.
>
> China also has border conflicts with Tajiskistan and a small part of
> Afghanistan to extend its current province of Xinjiang to the West. The
> international borders of China are then extremely fuzzy. With India and
> Bhutan, the claims are theorically existing but India has kept its
> presence. The situation is much less clear however with Jammu and Kashmir
> (that has its own separatist movement in addition to the Pakistan claims)
> and is now becoming more critical with Tajikistan and in the troubled area
> bordering Afghanistan, both areas having autonomist islamic movements in
> Xinjiang (including now some of them allied with Talebans operating in
> Afghanistan and Tajikistan since the dissolution of the former USSR: before
> that dissolution, this was also a region of border conflicts between China
> and USSR).
>
> Now China has also maritime bordering conflicts in the South China Sea
> from Vietnam to the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei as China wants to
> extend its maritime borders to the south to include various small islands.
> It has also conflicts with Taiwan to the north of that maritime area.
>
> Defining the borders of China is really complicate. And this has
> consequences also on the interpretation of Chinese subdivisions of
> provinces in ISO 3166-2. I would not associate flags with these official
> Chinese provinces given that even China does not claim any flag. But I
> would certainly not use these ISO 3166-2 Chinese subdivisions to associate
> them with historic regions annexed by China, or claimed by China over other
> countries (which are still a source of active conflicts and military
> actions or political tensions by China against Vietnam, Taiwan, the
> Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, as well with South Korea and Japan. All
> countries around China have to protect their borders with China whose power
> and influence is growing (even in the easternmost part of Russia with an
> important Chinese community supporting China rather than Russia for the
> historic conflicts with Japan).
>
> We've not seen any sign of stabilization and in fact the number of
> territorial conflicts is growing, as well as the Chinese military presence
> in all these bordering regions. Many of these existing countries also have
> internal troubles since long (e.g. Myanmar, and even Vietnam due to the
> past wars and military support of China for Northern Vietnam against
> Southern Vietnam: now Vietnam has a significant Chinese community in its
> own borders, which could support the Chinese claims in South China Sea). It
> seems that China wants to create a huge matitime area connecting the
> maritime roads from Hong Kong to Singapore and new conflicts could appear
> with Indonesia.
>
> 2015-07-01 19:33 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>:
>
>> Shervin Afshar <shervinafshar at gmail dot com> wrote:
>>
>> > This is a mechanism for flags of sub-regions with ISO 3166-2 codes;
>> > e.g. US States, countries and provinces of the UK, Tibet, etc.
>>
>> The Tibet Autonomous Region (CN-54), like other regions in China except
>> Hong Kong and Macao, has no official flag.
>>
>> Although this is what some users might expect, implementing or
>> interpreting "[flag]CN54" as the snow-lion flag, associated with the
>> Free Tibet movement, could be controversial and problematic in the
>> extreme. You know how China is.
>>
>> --
>> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
>>
>>
>>
>
Received on Thu Jul 02 2015 - 00:18:34 CDT

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