Journal to review university paper citing Hong Kong map without Victoria Harbour

An international journal has said it is looking into concerns raised over a map featured in a paper by an Education University of Hong Kong…

An international journal has said it is looking into concerns raised over a map featured in a paper by an Education University of Hong Kong (EdU) researcher, in which Victoria Harbour was omitted and Kowloon Peninsula was merged with Hong Kong Island.

A spokesman for the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journal said on Wednesday that its “assessment is ongoing”.

Meanwhile, EdU defended the map, saying it was neither a distortion nor an error but a cartographic characteristic based on administrative boundaries rather than land-outline or coastline data.

An academic, who filed a complaint to the journal, told the South China Morning Post on the condition of anonymity that the paper was written by Wang Cong, an associate professor at EdU’s Chinese language studies department,

The complainant added that the paper was supported by the Research Grants Council (RGC), a non-statutory advisory body under the University Grants Committee.

The paper was published in July last year and included a “highly absurd and severely flawed map of Hong Kong”, the academic said.