Every map of China is wrong

I work in a climate tech startup, and although I don’t directly manipulate geospatial data in my role (at least not at the moment), I’m very interested in this aspect of our work. I came across a seemingly innocuous message on Slack about how we had less information for a particular carbon offset project because of the China GPS shift problem.

This naturally piqued my interest — I didn’t know Chinese geospatial data would be any different from the rest of the world. Hadn’t this been one of the few areas where we all agreed about the right way to do things?

The more I delved into this topic, the more interesting stuff I found, and the more it made sense from a Chinese perspective. So I thought I’d share the story here. We’ll cover the following:

If you’ve never looked at a digital map of China, I urge you to do it now — initially, if you look at the street view, it looks like any other map you’ve encountered. However, if you overlay the satellite view you can see things are out of whack.

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