United Press International,
BEIJING: Mainland media control over Chinese-language content took a blow Wednesday with state press claiming rage after Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant Google removed referrals to Taiwan as a province.
Chinese media reports said “Google.com, world's largest Internet search engine, deleted the words 'Taiwan, a province of the People's Republic of China' on a map of Taiwan linked to its maps search engine maps.google.com. This has drawn rage from Chinese officials and the people.”
Google made the changes “under pressure of extremists in Taiwan's pan-Green camp (a pro-independence alliance between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the hard-line Taiwan Solidarity Union party),” Xinhua reported.
Company spokeswoman Debbie Frost claims the changes were just a “regular update” of all of the site's map pages, not a deliberate effort targeting the Taiwan page.
The backlash on Google's mainland business operations remains to be seen, with analysts monitoring China's latest attempt to impose its version of Taiwan sovereignty on the borderless world of the Internet.
While China claims the island of Taiwan, a handful of countries in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific Rim recognize its democratically elected government as an independent nation.
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