China recently started issuing passports with an updated design to its citizens. The redesigned passports have upset a number of China's neighbors with the map produced on the inside pages.  Those watermarked pages show a map of China that includes areas of the region under dispute by several neighboring countries.

There are two main controversial areas on the passport map.

The first is the inclusion of South China Sea Islands which has upset the Philippines and Vietnam.  The government of Vietnam has lodged a formal complaint against the Chinese embassy in Hanoi.  Raul Hernandez, the foreign ministry spokesperson for Vietnam stated, "The action of China is contrary to the spirit of the declaration of conduct of parties in the South China Sea."

This is the latest of a string of complaints lodged by the Vietnamese government over the "nine-dotted line", a controversial cartographic depiction dating back to 1947 by the Chinese government which encircles the main islands of the South China Sea Islands: the Pratas Islands, the Paracel Islands, the Macclesfield Bank, and the Spratly Islands.

In response, Vietnamese officials are refusing the stamp the new passports, issuing visas on a separate piece of paper for Chinese visitors.

The second area of dispute involves India which has has a a fifty year old territory dispute involving Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin with China.  A month long war over the area was fought in 1962 and long stretches off the border area remain unresolved:

India says China controls 41,440 square kilometers (16,000 square miles) of its territory in Aksai Chin in Kashmir, while Beijing claims that the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which shares a 1,050-kilometer (650-mile) border with the Chinese-run region of Tibet, is rightfully Chinese territory.

Tensions over this area have been inflamed by the new Chinese passport map which shows both areas within Chinese territory.  In a tit-for-tat move, officials at the Indian Embassy in Beijing have been stamping an official map of India on visas for Chinese citizens.

One area of geographic controversy not shown on the new Chinese passport maps is the depiction of islands in the East China Sea which are under dispute by both China and Japan.

Inside page of the new Chinese passport showing a map of China that includes
disputed areas.

Google's market share in China has been on the decline since shutting down its search engine for the country

Google's mobile maps product saw its market share in China decline by close to 50% in the third quarter due to Apple switching to its own maps product for its iOS 6 upgrade, according to a Beijing-based research firm.

At the end of the third quarter, the company's market share fell to 9%, making it the sixth largest vendor in China's mobile maps sector, according to Analysys International. This marked a major fall from the second-place spot it held in the previous quarter when its market share was at 17.5%.

The decline largely stems from Apple's September upgrade to its iOS operating system, which removed Google maps and replaced it with Apple's own mapping product for China, according to Yi Jingxue, an analyst with Analysys International.

"In September, once users made the change to the new iOS, Google lost a lot of users," she said.

Google's popularity in the country has been on the decline since 2010, when the company decided to shut down its search engine at the Chinese domain google.cn following disputes with the Chinese government over censorship. The company's global search engine, along with Gmail and Google Maps, still remain available online in the country. However, access to the products can be either slow or blocked, due interference from Chinese censors.

"The user experience on Google Maps hasn't been very good," Yi said. "This has driven away many of the company's partners to use other mapping products."

To continue operating Google Maps in China, the company last year had toapply for a state license from the Chinese government, or face penalties. Google said Tuesday it is still in discussions with Chinese authorities about how it can offer a maps products in China.

At the top of China's mobile maps market is AutoNavi, which also provides the map data for Apple's iOS 6 app, according to Analysys International. AutoNavi was one of the first companies in China to provide mobile maps, and had a 25.9% share of the market in the third quarter. Baidu, China's largest search engine, was second with a 19.1% share.

China's National Remote Sensing Center (NRSCC) will be responsible for building a highly accurate navigation system for all of China's major cities by 2015, according to a strategy laid out by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The plan is to create a precise positioning system capable of 0.1 meters accuracy outdoors, and 3 meters indoors using Cooperative Real-time Precise positioning.

The system, known as Xihe after an ancient god, has been tested in urban areas, and will roll out in Shanghai then across other cities in the country by the end of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). 

The NRSCC got its start in 1996 with the goal of developing innovations in remote sensing, geographic information systems, navigation and positioning. NRSCC is the agency responsible for China's cooperation with Europe on the Galileo global navigation system of systems (GNSS) and is also one of teh co-chairs of GEO.. The Xihe system represents a major research effort to apply cutting edge technologies to solve real world problems, and to advance high tech capacity within the country.

Cooperative Real-time Precise positioning is a network-based approach such as a cooperative geodetic reference network or real time kinematic (RTK) service where distributed reference stations communicate with one another. No details of the network were made available, however such systems are in widespread use in other countries. The scale and scope of this roll-out are compellins as is the indication that it has precise precision indoors, which is a difficult issue to solve with satellite-based positioning.

A new satellite for China's indigenous Beidou navigation system will be launched at the end of October to join 15 satellites already in orbit, the Beijing News reported. The new satellite will complete a network that can offer services to customers in the Asia-Pacific region.

China has sent five civilian satellites into space since the 2012 beginning to speed up the completion of the network for the Beidou navigation and positioning system.

In 2000, China launched its first navigation satellite for the Beidou system, which it sees as an alternative to the US government-run GPS.

The country will have a regional Beidou navigation system covering China and neighbouring regions this year and will provide services to global customers upon its completion in 2020, according to the China National Space Administration.

The system will be used in transportation, weather forecasting, marine fisheries, forestry, telecommunications, hydrological monitoring and mapping.

While many around the world have slammed Apple's new mapping software in iOS 6, the company has built a special version of Maps for China that has been praised as a "huge improvement over Google Maps," though it lacks some new features due to Chinese laws.

Maps in China in iOS 6 (left) are more detailed than the previous Google Maps (right). Screenshots via Anthony Drendel.

Apple's Maps in China are more detailed than competitors thanks to data provided by AutoNavi Holdings, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. It is the most widely used mobile mapping service in china, making navigation systems, virtual maps and satellite images.

However, Apple's special version of Maps in China does not integrate data from TomTom, which is used for mapping data around the world outside of China. As a result, Chinese users who want to look at other countries outside of their own cannot access landmarks or public transit stops.

Apple's unique-to-China maps also lack spoken turn-by-turn directions, or the 3D flyover feature that is available to other worldwide users on the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and new iPad.

Instead, users in China can only access written directions, and satellite imagery for other countries is displayed in black.

The problem comes from the fact that only 11 companies in China have licenses to do comprehensive mapping, according to the Journal. Half of those companies only support the government and do not make commercial-level products.

Citing an unnamed source, Wednesday's report said that integrating AutoNavi apps from China with other data from around the world would be an incredibly complex undertaking, which is why the detailed mapping data is restricted to China.

Chinese iOS 6 users cannot access satellite imagery outside of China (as seen on the left). Screenshots via The Wall Street Journal.

Still, user Anthony Drendel wrote on his blog that iOS 6 Maps are "a huge improvement over Google Maps" for the 1.3 billion people who live in China. There, he said, Google Maps "was always pretty terrible."

"In the big cities and tourist centers, it was passable," he said. "once you left China's large metropolises, however, you were pretty much on your own."

But with the use of AutoNavi in China, iOS 6 Maps now have far greater detail than Google Maps provides. Google's hands are tied because the search company is not among the 11 mapping companies authorized by the Chinese government.

"In my experience, the new version of Maps zooms in much further, shows more points of interest, clearly labels banks and cellphone shops (China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom), and gives the locations of ATMs and public restrooms (my original iPad running iOS 6 doesn't show either of those things)," Drendel wrote. "The killer feature, though, is that iOS Maps shows both English names and Chinese characters for everything, whereas Google-powered Maps only shows the English translation."

With the release of iOS 6 last week, Apple officially dropped Google Maps data for its built-in Maps application on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Instead, the company how offers its own in-house solution that users have said is not as good as Google's offering found in previous releases of iOS.