Searching for books on Amazon.com from my desk in Taichung, Taiwan, when I got this crap. Bottom pick shows HELP with a help line in China, in simplified characters.
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6 comments:
I came across this the other day as well, the ISO code of TW is for Taiwan, Province of China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1
Taiwan sued ISO in 2007, but it looks like it is still in error.
Amazon doesn't know it can kowtow to the PRC while accepting Taiwan's defacto independence.Is this a trend due to PRC pressure of some kind,maybe a presager of things to come?
I had/have a related problem with my Kindle for PC. An update about a year ago switched the language from English to Chinese Simplified characters.
My laptop was purchased in Taiwan but I now live in Australia. My guess is Amazon auto-detected a Chinese language system and updated accordingly. Bit annoying trying to find which button changes the language back.
It's rampant. If you order from http://www.betterworldbooks.com, the shipping label arrives saying "TAIWAN, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA."
...and, if you order books from BetterWorldBooks.com in the UK, the shipping label arrives saying "TAIWAN, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA."
>>Taiwan sued ISO in 2007, but it looks like it is still in error.
The Chen Shui-bian Government started the law-suit in 2007.
In May, 2008, Ma Ying-Jeou took the office and put the case to rest, based on its fundamentalist stand of "Taiwan is part of China" and "Taiwan is not a country", officially under the disguise of "rest from diplomatic warfare with China" (外交休兵).
Since all web sites and software systems utilize the ISO country list and abbreviations for automatic drop-down list and label prints, "Taiwan, Province of China" has become the "standard".
Big companies, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., that have a stake in the Taiwan market, manually alter the purchased ISO list to delete the "Province of China" part from the list. Often though, when a new/updated software/system (typically including third-party code or contracted coding) is introduced, the issue returns and the company has to manually fixed the issue, usually after a flood of Taiwanese complaints. This has been a chronic headache to the companies that are willing to show goodwill to the Taiwanese. Most companies just cannot be bothered due to the extra cost.
China wins by default in this case. It looks petty but it is critical in today's information age. Information alters people's perception of the world, thus, over time alters the "reality". People are now gradually getting used to the idea of Taiwan being a Chinese appendix that pains chronically and subconsciously would welcome a removal surgery, a stand of the New York Times.
The next Taiwanese government needs to pay attention to this issue.
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