And today's Chinese province ofTibet is different from the historic Tibet, as China incorporated other surrounding areas, including some parts taken from Bhutan (a small part around Legaru, and a larger part to the North) and India (some parts to the West from states of Jammu and Kashmir, which itself is also claimed by Pakistan, and of Uttarakhand, and to the East from Arunachal Pradesh), as well as modifying the internal borders of Chinese provinces of Xinjiang in the nort-west and of Sichuan on the east. The whole new province is still named Tibet but much larger than the historic country of Tibet before its annexion.
The Chinese claims in India and Bhutan are contested and is still subject to very active military tensions with India. This question is then more important than only the Tibetan free movement that does not claim anything to India and Bhutan (and in fact these two countries are hosting Tibetan refugees and the Free Tibet movement itself) and do not claim anything in Chinese parts previously part of Sichuan and Xinjiang provinces. China also has border conflicts with Tajiskistan and a small part of Afghanistan to extend its current province of Xinjiang to the West. The international borders of China are then extremely fuzzy. With India and Bhutan, the claims are theorically existing but India has kept its presence. The situation is much less clear however with Jammu and Kashmir (that has its own separatist movement in addition to the Pakistan claims) and is now becoming more critical with Tajikistan and in the troubled area bordering Afghanistan, both areas having autonomist islamic movements in Xinjiang (including now some of them allied with Talebans operating in Afghanistan and Tajikistan since the dissolution of the former USSR: before that dissolution, this was also a region of border conflicts between China and USSR). Now China has also maritime bordering conflicts in the South China Sea from Vietnam to the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei as China wants to extend its maritime borders to the south to include various small islands. It has also conflicts with Taiwan to the north of that maritime area. Defining the borders of China is really complicate. And this has consequences also on the interpretation of Chinese subdivisions of provinces in ISO 3166-2. I would not associate flags with these official Chinese provinces given that even China does not claim any flag. But I would certainly not use these ISO 3166-2 Chinese subdivisions to associate them with historic regions annexed by China, or claimed by China over other countries (which are still a source of active conflicts and military actions or political tensions by China against Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, as well with South Korea and Japan. All countries around China have to protect their borders with China whose power and influence is growing (even in the easternmost part of Russia with an important Chinese community supporting China rather than Russia for the historic conflicts with Japan). We've not seen any sign of stabilization and in fact the number of territorial conflicts is growing, as well as the Chinese military presence in all these bordering regions. Many of these existing countries also have internal troubles since long (e.g. Myanmar, and even Vietnam due to the past wars and military support of China for Northern Vietnam against Southern Vietnam: now Vietnam has a significant Chinese community in its own borders, which could support the Chinese claims in South China Sea). It seems that China wants to create a huge matitime area connecting the maritime roads from Hong Kong to Singapore and new conflicts could appear with Indonesia. 2015-07-01 19:33 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Shervin Afshar <shervinafshar at gmail dot com> wrote: > > > This is a mechanism for flags of sub-regions with ISO 3166-2 codes; > > e.g. US States, countries and provinces of the UK, Tibet, etc. > > The Tibet Autonomous Region (CN-54), like other regions in China except > Hong Kong and Macao, has no official flag. > > Although this is what some users might expect, implementing or > interpreting "[flag]CN54" as the snow-lion flag, associated with the > Free Tibet movement, could be controversial and problematic in the > extreme. You know how China is. > > -- > Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸 > > >
