Every map of China is wrong. And this is intentional…

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.

I know I’ve historically railed on the frustrations engineers face when dealing with time zones, so tickle me surprised when I saw Naz link to this post giving me a new esoteric cause to rail on: GPS shift!