
In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag - miles
https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025?s=21
======
miles
Turns out this has been going on for some time:

Can't see this emoji (Taiwanese Flag) on macOS
[https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-
th...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-this-emoji-
on-macos)

You can’t use the Taiwan flag emoji on a Chinese iPhone
[https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-
on...](https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on-a-chinese-
iphone/)

------
CompuHacker
Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

People with out of date versions of OSX may now be subjected to more scrutiny.
Apple may have made an undocumented decision (or introduced a bug) that could
cause death.

~~~
13of40
> Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

Not completely unheard of...

[https://emojipedia.org/pistol/](https://emojipedia.org/pistol/)

~~~
seba_dos1
Doesn't really count as "breaking Unicode".

~~~
darkpuma
Perhaps China can give Taiwan the finger without "breaking unicode" by simply
demanding that fonts including the Taiwanese flag use a glyph that reads "One
China Policy".

~~~
seba_dos1
Toy pistol is still a pistol, so everything's alright. You'd have to replace
the glyph with something that can still be considered Taiwanese flag.

~~~
darkpuma
Frankly that's an abuse of language. If you were to say

> _" In the UK, it is legal for children to buy pistols"_

Everybody would call you nuts. If you then smirked and said that water pistols
are pistols, they'd groan at you.

~~~
seba_dos1
No, now that's an abuse of logic and intention. We're talking about symbolic
pictograms here, not laws. Just as you can depict emoticons by using humans,
robots, colorful blobs or martians, you can depict pistols as toys, futuristic
laser blowers, steampunk machinery or wild west revolvers. It's a symbol and
you're free to show it any way you want.

~~~
darkpuma
We're talking about language, not cars. It's no different than if all the
emoticons for cars were modified to be RC cars with large antennas surrounded
by lighting bolts to signify that they're receiving radio transmissions. An RC
car "is a car" a hypothetical you might protest, but a toy car is not the same
in substance as "a car" in much the same way that a toy pistol is not the same
in substance as "a pistol." Perhaps one day moralizing tech companies might
even take this seriously and revise fonts to denormalize personal car
ownership for the noble cause of environmental protection. Is that ridiculous?
No moreso I'd argue than depicting all handguns as squirt guns.

~~~
seba_dos1
Depicting "car" emoji as a toy car would be perfectly fine and within the
artistic license of font makers. Just as depicting a toy gun is.

~~~
13of40
Imagine if they decided to turn the LGBT rainbow icon into a couple of hands
holding each other, not to enhance the meaning of the glyph, but to, you know,
protect children from gay ideas and make it harder for people to communicate
about LGBT issues. Is that fair play? To me it sounds like somewhere between
how dictionaries used to censor naughty words and 1984's newspeak.

~~~
seba_dos1
No, because couple of hands holding each other doesn't represent "Rainbow
Flag" (combination of "Waving White Flag" and "Rainbow" glyphs) in any way, so
that's a clear spec violation.

However, if they decided to show a "rainbow painted on a white flag" instead
of "rainbow-colored flag", it would be well within the Unicode spec. Of course
it would have additional meaning and you can disagree with such decision on
other grounds (I probably would), but it still wouldn't be "breaking Unicode",
just like toy gun as "pistol" or toy car as "car" isn't. Hell, you can even
make a font where every single emoji is depicted by toy cars doing silly faces
and carrying things around.

~~~
13of40
> a clear spec violation

This is the meat of it. You don't give a shit about the spec.

------
Someone
Bad, but also ‘just’ an extension of ‘tweaking’ maps by changing country names
and borders, something every map maker that wants to have global presence has
to do.

For example, see
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10/google-
maps-disputed-territories-palestineishere) (found by googling “map borders
change depending on location”)

------
carlob
> We are locked :( I will never buy any China model of any Apple product
> again.

I wonder if anyone else can see the cognitive dissonance of this half-assed
Boycott...

------
9999px
It's not as bad as it looks – he clarifies the situation in later tweets:

"The region you choose on the setup assistant will stay unchanged untill [sic]
you reinstall the OS. I saw users who bought the Chinese model set the initial
region to elsewhere, thus 🇹🇼 is properly displayed on their Mac and the
10.14.4 upgrade won’t affect them."

"So again there's no hardware lock. It has nothing to do with T2 chips. The
only thing that changed is the mechanism macOS use to detect regions. You are
still in control of your China model Macbooks."

[https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056](https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056)

------
Sniffnoy
Non-mobile link:
[https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025](https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025)

------
benj111
Who even thinks up this stuff? Why?

Yeah I get "to de legitimise the Taiwanese govt", 1984 Newspeak, etc. But
people are going to convey the idea one way or another. Its just petty and
pointless. I suppose you could say that about a lot of censorship, but this
just takes it to an extra level.

~~~
theobeers
It's a bit like the efforts of the Iranian government to force people to use
the term "Persian Gulf" rather than "Arabian Gulf." They passed a law in 2010
that was supposed to ban any international airline from Iranian airspace, if
it referred to the body of water as the "Arabian Gulf" in its in-flight maps
or other public displays.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-
airlines-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-
persian-gulf)

~~~
aaomidi
I don't think these are similar at all honestly

~~~
schappim
How so?

~~~
darkpuma
Because "Arabian Gulf", not "Persian Gulf" is the newspeak. Perhaps anti-
Iranian bias (disturbingly common in the west these days) has colored your
perception of this issue.

~~~
theobeers
I’m a Persianist first and foremost, but I also spent time living in Oman, and
it seems ludicrous to me that the legitimacy of the way that Gulf Arabs refer
to the body of water bordering their countries (al-Khalīj al-‘Arabī, “the
Arabian Gulf”) should be challenged. How could we possibly demand that one
name or the other be used everywhere in the world?

------
dukoid
Well if mainland China sees Taiwan as a (temporarily lost) "province", why
can't it have a flag? Don't other Chinese provinces not have a flag?

~~~
taejo
No, Chinese provinces don't have flags. The SARs do; municipalities have
theoretically not been allowed to have their own flags since 1997, but several
are still using flags from before then and others have adopted flags since
then.

------
fouc
Will Macs Sold in Taiwan have the reverse problem?

~~~
warp_factor
probably not.

After spending an extensive amount of time in Mainland China and Taiwan, it is
fascinating to see how one country initially evolved in two separate countries
based on different ideologies.

I would go as far as to say that if you want to see what communism and
capitalism do to a country, those two are a perfect example.

~~~
chillacy
The communism capitalism dichotomy masks a lot of subtlety, including: China’s
market reforms, Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military
dictatorship during much of its economic development, the relative sizes of
the two countries, China interfering with Taiwan’s economy, etc

I say this because Taiwan isn’t doing as hot in economic development compared
to China costal cities in recent years, but much of that comes from a myriad
of other reasons besides “communism is better than capitalism”.

~~~
warp_factor
I agree with you completely, it is a simplistic example of course. But
spending multiple weeks in each you can have a feel for the culture of each
place, the way people behave, their level of education etc etc.

~~~
heavenlyblue
You agree with the parent completely, yet continue making exactly the same
point you made before.

------
dis-sys
The title is misleading at best - the concerned flag is not Taiwanese flag, it
is called the Flag of the Republic of China [1]. It is the flag refused to be
displayed even by the current government of Republic of China, e.g. the
government of Republic of China recently proposed to remove the exact same
flag from its national ID card [2], the Republic of China government also
refused to display this flag during its most recent national day celebration
[3].

The flag used by those Pro-independence organizations[4], usually called the
Taiwanese Flag, is vastly different and never got accepted by the mainstream
to start with.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China)

[2]
[https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/](https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/)

[3]
[https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223](https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan)

~~~
theobeers
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I clicked through to the Wikipedia
entry that you cited, and it begins, "The flag of the Republic of China is the
national flag of Taiwan…"

edit: Is the technicality simply that the ROC flag was originally used on the
mainland?

~~~
laurent123456
The Republic of China was founded in China but then they lost the war against
the communists and fled to Taiwan. So that's why they kept on using the ROC
flag there.

China doesn't recognise this flag since they consider that Taiwan is part of
China. There's also a movement within Taiwan to change the flag but they
probably won't do it because China would see that as a move towards
independence, and could retaliate.

