Talk:China (cultural region)

Apparently the main China article was blanked and replaced with the People's Republic of China one at some point in 2011, which now puts our article organisation at odds with pretty much all the other wikis, but people are unable to go back on this because it's politically charged. [1] This is one of the things that could only be solved by investing extreme levels of wikidrama so it may be better to look for a workaround. The blanked page now is here. This was our "China" page as a matter of course form 2003 until September 2011. The politics of this is probably roughly similar to the Macedonia issue, and a circumspect solution would probably take into account what has been going on there. --dab (𒁳) 07:45, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

I suppose "China" is somewhere between China proper and Sinosphere ("China proper" being the mininal core China, subtracting all that is arguably not part of China, and conversely "Sinosphere" is maximal, including all that can arguably be said to be at least historically influenced by Chinese culture). I do not like to advocate CFORKing, and all of this clearly has scope overlap, but it seems a bit confusing to have articles about "China proper" and "Sinosphere" but no article whatsoever just about "China". I suppose "China" as a cultural region is larger than Qin China -- perhaps roughly Song China/Ming China? Clearly Qing territory has imperial character, as, e.g. Bishkek cannot reasonably be said to be "in China". --dab (𒁳) 08:18, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Dbachmann, it's basically because people care more about reflecting the most common usage than they do about maintaining neutrality. Nyttend (talk) 00:50, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

"common usage" is fine, but "common usage" depends on context. The term "China" had the cultural region as its primary referent for the past 500 years. Yes, the PRC is the polity in de facto control of China (and beyond), but this has only been the case since the 1940s. Any article linking to "China" in a pre-1940s context will not be served expected page based on "common usage".

It is enough to cast a glance at how this has been handled by other wikis. Compare the interwiki links for Q29520 "China" to Q29520 "People's Republic of China". I think it is pretty evident which position should be considered the default one, and which would need strong and explicit arguments to back it up as a valid alternative. --dab (𒁳) 14:41, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

The discussion that led to the current situation is at Talk:Chinese civilization/Archive 26#Requested move August 2011. The result was not a blanking but a merge.

That the other wikis do something is not a reason for enwiki to do it. The Macedonia analogy makes no sense: no-one is claiming that the currents inhabitants of China are not genetic, linguistic and cultural descendents of the Chinese of ancient times. An article referring to "China" in some earlier period should link to the specific article for that period, as would an article referring to "Egypt", "Greece" or "India" in earlier periods. Kanguole 02:25, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

"The term "China" had the cultural region as its primary referent for the past 500 years. " That is just totally wrong. The term had whatever state was in existence in that area at the time as its referent, just as it does today. And, again, how any other language wiki handles things is completely irrelevant to how the English wiki handles things.--Khajidha (talk) 14:14, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

• oppose. Others have made these points already, but they are worth restating. The reason the article at China is about the country is as that’s what the country is called in English, i.e. it’s the Common name, overwhelmingly so, and so is the correct article at the right place. This was discussed at great length 5+ years ago, and if anything the argument is even stronger now as the world discusses China more and more. What other languages do is irrelevant. Not only do they have different policies and practices, but most importantly this is a matter of English usage; what the country is called in French, German etc. is entirely irrelevant. Certainly don’t look to Wikidata for guidance on this as it is simply unable to cope with this or similar issues.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 19:41, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I should also add that this merge request makes no sense. There is nothing to merge as this 'article' has no content, and the proposer seems to not understand that the article now at China was moved, not blanked (which would imply previous content). The page once at China was moved to Chinese civilization which was then merged with other articles, including China, Chinese culture and History of China, and now disambiguates between them. That article, the former Chinese civilization is perhaps closest to what other wikipedias have for China, but as I noted above Wikidata is unable to to cope with this.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 19:55, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose as per above. There has recently been a move discussion at Talk:China#Requested move 11 December 2016, which was closed per WP:SNOW. Creating a redirect and then suggesting to merge the China article into the redirect is unorthodox, but seems to be just another attempt to detach "China" from the current PRC. --T*U (talk) 10:10, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose—this proposal doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell to succeed, and there was already a discussion about this a month ago. —MartinZ02 (talk) 20:56, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per above. The current situation uses the common name for both (China, Taiwan), both of which might be objected to by people on the other side of the conflict. If it was switched, then it would be a NPOV-violation for failing to recognize the succession of states on the mainland, and for using the legal name of a country much more commonly called by another name. Since both results would have NPOV reasons, the current situation is the preferable one because common names are used, and it doesn't use a Cold War mindset to deny the legitimacy of the PRC, which seems like the greater of the two NPOV-violations. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 04:33, 9 January 2017 (UTC)