Over the past year, a campaign aimed at rectifying and standardizing the market for maps of China has been conducted nationwide. With 4,800 cases of illegal map production dealt with and 1.47 million illegal maps confiscated, people's consciousness of the need to accurately define the national territory has greatly improved.

The campaign was jointly sponsored and conducted by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the National Copyright Administration. A national conference on rectifying and standardizing market order in the map sector was recently held in Beijing to summarize experiences, cite outstanding achievements and make future plans.

The achievements in the campaign included banning and confiscating 560,000 volumes of maps published by unauthorized units, dealing with 140,000 problem terrestrial globes and 780,000 illegal map products, and examining and approving the activities of various map publishers, said Chen Bangzhu, director of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping.

"The campaign also corrected 1,800 billboards with problem maps on them, and stopped the activities on 82 map manufacturers and 3,429 map sellers. Some 1,024 enterprises were warned," said Chen.

"Problem maps" mainly include those wrongly depicting national boundaries. Through the campaign, maps containing political errors, such as those that were not in conformity with the principle of the "one China" policy, have been basically stopped.

Chen said that the work of rectifying and standardizing the map market was fully supported by the people. The state accepted and heard a total of 600 cases reported by members of the public in the period. Last year, a foreign investor who sought the production of 50,000 terrestrial globes in a Guangdong factory insisted that certain parts of the country should not be shown as such; the factory immediately rejected the proposal.

A middle school student from the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region who found a problem map on the Internet, e-mailed the offending website asking it to make rectification of the error.

How to judge whether a map is right or wrong? The easiest way is to download the standardized the map of China or the map of world from the website of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, according to the expert.

(China.org.cn translated by Li Jingrong September 27, 2003)