By Rachel Lu
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
On March 28, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping at a dinner where they exchanged gifts. Merkel presented to Xi a 1735 map of China made by prolific French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville and printed by a German publishing house. According to an antique-maps website, d’Anville’s map was based on earlier geographical surveys done by Jesuit missionaries in China and represented the “summation of European knowledge on China in the 18th-century.” The map showed, according to its original Latin caption, the so-called “China Proper” — that is, the Chinese heartland mostly populated by ethnic Han people, without Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Manchuria. The islands of Taiwan and Hainan — the latter clearly part of modern China, the former very much disputed — are shown with a different color border.
Historical maps are sensitive business in China. Every schoolchild in China learns that Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and the Diaoyu Islands have been “inalienable parts of China since ancient times.” The d’Anville map, at least visually, is a rejection of that narrative. Unsurprisingly, China’s official media outlets don’t seem to have appreciated Merkel’s gift. The People’s Daily, which has given meticulous accounts of Xi’s European tour, elided any coverage of the offending map. More curiously, when news of the map’s presentation reached the Chinese heartland, it had somehow morphed into a completely different one. A map published in many Chinese-language media reports about Merkel’s gift-giving shows the Chinese empire at its territorial zenith, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and large swaths of Siberia. This larger map was the handiwork of British mapmaker John Dower, published in 1844 by Henry Teesdale & Co. in London, and was certainly not the gift from Merkel to Xi. But this mistake was not noted or explained in Chinese reports.
Both versions of the Merkel map have made appearances on Chinese social media, eliciting vastly different interpretations. Those who saw the d’Anville map seemed shocked by its limited territories. Hao Qian, a finance reporter, remarked that the map is “quite an awkward gift.” Writer Xiao Zheng blasted Merkel for trying to “legitimize the Tibet and Xinjiang independence movements.” Architect Liu Kun wrote, “The Germans definitely have ulterior motives.” One Internet user asked, “How is this possible? Where is Tibet, Xinjiang, the Northeast? How did Xi react?”
The Dower map, on the other hand, seemed to stoke collective nostalgia for large territories and imperial power. An advertising executive enthused, “Our ancestors are badass.” Another Internet user hoped Xi would feel “encouraged” by the map to “realize what a true re-emerge of China means.” Some suspected that Merkel tried to send Xi a subtle reminder that Russia had helped Mongolia declare independence from China in the mid-20th century, somewhat like what Russia did in Crimea in March 2014.
To be sure, the d’Anville map does not constitute a total contradiction of the Chinese government’s version of history. In 1735, the year when the Qianlong Emperor began his six-decade reign, his Qing empire’s military prowess was on the ascent. Qianlong quelled a rebellion by Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang, brought the Mongol tribes under closer rule, and appointed officials to oversee affairs in Tibet such as the selection of the Dalai Lama. In other words, Qianlong established the trappings of imperial control over these peripheral territories, which allowed later governments — the Republic of China, then the current People’s Republic of China — to claim sovereignty. Maps published by Western countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries vary in their presentations of Tibet and Xinjiang, but the Dower map is certainly not alone in showing Xinjiang and Tibet as parts of the Chinese empire.
All the cartographic brouhaha may be overblown. One Internet user refused to “overinterpret” the d’Anville map as a message about Tibet or Xinjiang. After all, “You can’t use a map of the 13 colonies of the United States made in 1776 to tell Americans that Texas or California is not U.S. territory.”
Photo: Fair Use
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RELATED STORY:
Goodbye, Oil: US Navy Cracks New Renewable Energy Technology To Turn Seawater Into Fuel, Allowing Ships To Stay At Sea Longer
By Christopher Harress
International Business Times
International Business Times
The Navy fleet line, but could be doing so under steam of a new kind of fuel. U.S. Navy
After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel.
The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel could one day relieve the military’s dependence on oil-based fuels and is being heralded as a “game changer” because it could allow military ships to develop their own fuel and stay operational 100 percent of the time, rather than having to refuel at sea.
The new fuel is initially expected to cost around $3 to $6 per gallon, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has already flown a model aircraft on it.
The Navy’s 289 vessels all rely on oil-based fuel, with the exception of some aircraft carriers and 72 submarines that rely on nuclear propulsion. Moving away from that reliance would free the military from fuel shortages and fluctuations in price.
“It’s a huge milestone for us,” said Vice Adm. Philip Cullom. “We are in very challenging times where we really do have to think in pretty innovative ways to look at how we create energy, how we value energy and how we consume it. We need to challenge the results of the assumptions that are the result of the last six decades of constant access to cheap, unlimited amounts of fuel.”
The breakthrough came after scientists developed a way to extract carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater. The gasses are then turned into a fuel by a gas-to-liquids process with the help of catalytic converters.
“For us in the military, in the Navy, we have some pretty unusual and different kinds of challenges,” said Cullom. “We don’t necessarily go to a gas station to get our fuel. Our gas station comes to us in terms of an oiler, a replenishment ship. Developing a game-changing technology like this, seawater to fuel, really is something that reinvents a lot of the way we can do business when you think about logistics, readiness.”
The next challenge for the Navy is to produce the fuel in industrial quantities. It will also partner with universities to maximize the amount of CO2 and carbon they can recapture.
”For the first time we’ve been able to develop a technology to get CO2 and hydrogen from seawater simultaneously. That’s a big breakthrough,” said Dr. Heather Willauer, a research chemist who has spent nearly a decade on the project, adding that the fuel “doesn’t look or smell very different.”
“We’ve demonstrated the feasibility, we want to improve the process efficiency,” explained Willauer.
Christopher Harress
Christopher Harress
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