Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Ray (Eclecticology) wrote:
"The official name for any country is the long form..."
Sorry, but I stopped reading at that point.
I think what he meant (or should have said) is the following, which is
subtly yet crucially different:
>>>The official name for any *government* is the long form.
>>>
Although this does not change my agreement about the naming of the
articles. I disagree with you factually about the use of long forms.
The long form is the formal and official name of a country that it
would use in international legal documents. It is not the name of any
particular government, even though the name may be changed by successive
governments to reflect their particular points of view.
China, whether it's "really" one country
or not, currently has two
sovereign political divisions: PRC and ROC.
That too is debatable. I happen to support the view that Taiwan is not
a part of China, and that its government has no business calling itself
China. Chinese occupation of Taiwan only began at the end of the Ming
dynasty - a fairly short time by Chinese standards.
If one division claims
jurisdiction over the other, we should mention that in the article. But
we should absolutely not respect one side's claims over the other. We
must remain neutral, even if "everyone knows" that the only legitimate
government of all of China is X.
All the more reason for the meaning of [[China]] to be fairly open-ended.
Eclecticology