for earlier material see talk china old hi i've edited the china temp page restored the table per the wikiproject countries page put in a disclaimer move the brief history of china into the section for history although i have rewritten some of the text i think i have not really touched it's contents roadrunner fred what do you think aug pdt it's less objectionable but i still have a small problem with it the basic problem is that is seems to imply the the prc owns say the history of tang dynasty also it doesn't really take into account current events one of the things that the prc government has been doing in the past year has been to delink the concept of the prc from the concept of china you can see this in the response to chen shuibian that was issued today where the prc was went out of its way to avoid identifying the prc with china i'll probably drop out of the discussion for a few days and let other people comment as well as try to articulate better what still bothers me about the page user roadrunner ok we're moving towards a solution so that's good as for the tang dynasty though i think you mean it more genral i think that taiwan did not form part of the tang empire anyway there's nothing against mentioning the tang dynasty at taiwan as well we may indeed specifically include in the history header disclaimer that the prc avoids linking its name to china then again it may de link it formally but all those people around the world will continue to associate the two i'll await your remaining problems with the contents confident we'll end up with an article that satisfies the both of us and hopefully everybody else aug pdt guys after reading this tedious list of conversation my sugguestion of the best way out of the naming convention of china is using those by native speakers of chinese as a native speaker of several dialects of chinese i make the following table which should help how native chinese speakers refer to speakers from mainland china taiwan hongkong macau referring to china mainland china mainland daliu mainland or zhongguo daliu chong gua da lok in cantonese mainland taiwan taiwan or taiwan province the more official tone taiwan taiwan taiwan china the culture etc non political issue china china china china most chinese regardless of where they are from care less about the naming convention but some taiwanese like my buddy who is gonna marry next month do not want mainland china to annex taiwan and had bad impression on chen shuibian kt knowing what the chinese call it is certainly interesting but what is important is what the english language people call it i'm with jeronimo i also thought all of this already had been resolved china should be the main article of the proc it doesn't matter what they officially call it or want it to be called english speakers call it china in overwhelming numbers this is also the conventional short form used by the cia and the un and we have decided that that is what we will use for country names here if we don't stick to that then we are expressly taking sides in political naming issues the fact that the proc is currently trying to dissociate their government from china which seems counter intuitive for a totalitarian regime is an interesting thing to mention in the article on the proc at china if we change the name of the article to follow political correctness of the proc that is an express act of support for their policy i for one say we defer such naming matters to higher authorities such as the cia factbook the un and especially what is most commonly used by english speakers true they are pov institutions but transcribing what they use is a passive and not express act of pov wikipedia is not in the business to decide what the names of nations are other institutions are far better suited at this highly charged topic i also think the disclaimer is way too long and bold should be replaced by italics any article on the proc sho