this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
284 points (93.6% liked)

Map Enthusiasts

3596 readers
270 users here now

For the map enthused!

Rules:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia explains this quite well.

The US figures include coastal and territorial waters. The Chinese figures exclude them. This is supposedly because it's impossiblebto know what water area is claimed by China.

However, China clearly has a greater land mass area; and measurements including accepted water area for China are bigger than the US including its waters.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Therefore, while it can be determined that China has a larger area excluding coastal and territorial waters, it is unclear which country has a larger area including coastal and territorial waters.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area#cite_note-12