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

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 Wed Jul 01 2015 - 21:15:39 CDT