Official Map of China Gets Frisky Down South

 

News on the street is that China has a new appendage, and it’s rather large. Namely, the size of the entire South China Sea.

 

On Monday, in an attempt to teach people what exactly is and isn’t China’s, Beijing released an updated official map complete with a BIG RED dotted line around Chinese territory and in doing so engorged its claim to islands throughout the South China Sea.

 

Global Times quotes Executive Editor of China National Geographic as saying via his Weibo, "Horizontal maps can easily create misconceptions that China covers a wider range from west to east, while in fact the north-south distance is longer. It is because the measuring scale for the South China Sea box was only half of that of the main map."

 

 

Although it is sovereignty that the new map aims to promote, it is the penetrating shape has caught the imagination of Chinese netizens, commenting that rather than now looking like a rooster (or, you know, that other moniker), as taught in schools, the mainland has taken an altogether more bulbous outline. In fact, it may now resemble something altogether more pachydermic: