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So right now we have and it refers to the People's Republic of China (PROC)!

I find this a bit wrong, no matter the fact that we'll have a lot more questions about the PROC than the Republic of China (ROC) (), that the ROC is regarded as a rebel province by the PROC, or that lots of people say "China" when they mean "The People's Republic of China" - just as I do.

Regardless of how people feel about the ROC, we should not assume that "China" is the same as "The People's Republic of China". In fact, "China" refers to both the ancient civilization as well as the geographical area which comprises the territories of both the ROC and PROC.

I don't think we should resort to blacklisting just yet -- there might be conceivably questions about China in general, for which a tag like would work well.

should refer to China in general, with a separate tag for the People's Republic of China.

This is based on Should the "Korea" tag redirect to "South Korea"?

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  • @hippietrail: Do you understand my point now about 'common usage'?
    – Ankur Banerjee Mod
    Commented Dec 19, 2011 at 22:02
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    (Facepalm) As I was writing more comments yesterday about the Korea one, I was thinking 'I wonder when someone's going to call out about the 3 Chinas'...
    – Mark Mayo Mod
    Commented Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38
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    This question covers ground we have previously discussed when discussing tagging issues related to Palestine. This is not a constructive discussion, hence I'm closing it.
    – Ankur Banerjee Mod
    Commented Dec 19, 2011 at 23:16
  • @AnkurBanerjee: How is my question similar to that one?
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Dec 20, 2011 at 0:01
  • Because it is essentially about whether autonomous regions such as Taiwan be allowed their own tag or be referred to by their official name. PRC does not recognise ROC as an entity.
    – Ankur Banerjee Mod
    Commented Dec 20, 2011 at 0:10

2 Answers 2

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Firstly, it doesn't matter that it refers to the ancient civilization. This is a travel website, not a historical one, and as such we refer to the world as it stands now. Otherwise we'd have Soviet travel questions, or talk about Rhodesia...

The majority of the world refers to Taiwan as Taiwan. I see no Travel reason to change that. I can understand that politically there may be different names, but for the same reason, nobody is going to refer to The Republic of South Africa or even Aotearoa instead of New Zealand. It's what the countries are known as in the travelling world that should count here. Similarly, the PROC is, for most intents and purposes among travellers and the majority of the population, known as China. And if there's any doubt, it's clarified in the tag wiki*.

*Or should be ;)

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Many countries have an 'official' name and a common-usage name. In case of North and South Korea, the question is not about using the official name but about what the Korea synonym should map to. While the official name of Taiwan is Republic of China, that is not the Taiwanese themselves refer to it as normally. I see this the same way as a question about Palestine would involve questions of its sovereignty and what they call themselves.

I get the point that you're trying to make but if we start using official country names everywhere on the site, it's going to make life harder for everyone. Say a tag for PRC is created. A new user comes along and tries to create a 'China' tag. Then what? At the end of the day, our tagging system is a way of categorising information, not a place to make a political point.

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    Then you would also have to change a lot of other tags, Principality of Liechtenstein instead of Liechtenstein, Federal Republic of Germany instead of Germany, Swiss Confederation instead of Switzerland, etc...
    – RoflcoptrException
    Commented Dec 19, 2011 at 22:22
  • To clarify, what I meant is: ALWAYS use the most commonly used term used in English language to refer to a region as the tag for it. Use tag wikis to clarify intent of tag in case it's ambiguous in case of Korea/S.Korea.
    – Ankur Banerjee Mod
    Commented Dec 19, 2011 at 22:31
  • New users can't create tags anyway. You only get that privilege once you've spend enough time/effort on the site to hopefully have a feel for how the tagging system works.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Dec 20, 2011 at 7:36
  • Well you can't always use the most commonly used term because multiple places share names, like New York, Georgia, Victoria. In these cases we disambiguate. Other places have names which are shared with things other than places, that's why I made a bath-england because bath made it look like we also needed a shower (-:
    – hippietrail
    Commented Dec 20, 2011 at 7:39

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