The Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journal said its assessment of complaints about a paper featuring a map of Hong Kong without Victoria Harbour is ongoing. The paper was published last July by Wang Cong, an associate professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. The university has defended the map as a deliberate choice based on administrative boundaries.
A spokesman for the journal stated on Wednesday that the assessment is ongoing. The complaint was filed by an academic who described the map as highly absurd and severely flawed.
The Education University of Hong Kong maintained that the map was neither a distortion nor an error. It explained that the map reflects a cartographic characteristic focused on administrative boundaries rather than land outlines or coastlines.
The paper appeared in the journal last July. It was authored by Wang Cong from the university's Chinese language studies department.