Cartographic Regulations and Territory Making in Modern China, 1920s–30s

This research examines the Nationalist Government of China’s efforts to regulate map-making and disseminate “correct” territorial information to the public, exploring how this cartographic anxiety aligned with the regime’s political agendas of asserting sovereignty and fostering territorial consciousness and patriotism within society during the 1920s and 1930s.

After nominally unifying China in 1928, the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Government recognized that foreign countries had long gathered intelligence through cartographic surveys in China. The instability of the late Qing period and years of warlord conflicts had severely hindered China’s ability to conduct comprehensive territorial surveys. Consequently, Chinese map publishers often relied on Qing-era maps as base maps, which were widely circulated but deemed inaccurate by the government. The regime feared that these “fallacy maps,” if used by foreign countries in border negotiations, could place China at a disadvantage. In response, the Nationalist Government sought to “standardize” cartographic representations by issuing official mapping guidelines and template maps. It established a specialized map review agency to oversee commercial map publishing, ensure the accuracy of territorial information, and ban problematic maps. The cartographers and geographers employed by this agency became gatekeepers of “correct” territorial knowledge and aimed to guide publishers in the production of accurate maps. Meanwhile, aware of foreign sovereignty claims in disputed territories, the government initiated its own cartographic surveys to delineate official boundaries, with a particular focus on areas such as the Sino-British Yunnan-Burma border. This research demonstrates that the creation of the map regime in Nationalist China represented not only anxiety over territorial disputes but also a desire to shape discourses about China’s sovereignty.