06-17-201508:52 AM
(06-17-201512:42 AM)yangc9635 Wrote: Northern Cyprus is an integral part of Cyprus. It's only an area occupied by Turkey 'cuz they don't want Cyprus (a Greek speaking nation withan ethnic Greek majority) to join with Greece. As for Taiwan, it's been seperated from Mainland China since 1680 and has only been part of China for 15 years, so I wouldn't call it a part of China. Besides, Taiwanese people are ethnically, religiously and liguistically different from people in Mainland China.
With regard to Northern Cyprus, you failed to mention that only Turkey recognises is as a country. The rest of the world considered is an occupied part of the republic of Cyprus.
Taiwan is more complicated politically I believe. However the fact of the matter is that it is not recognised by the UN and only a tiny number of its members recognise Taiwan (http://www.quora.com/Which-countries-recognize-Taiwan-as-a-country). As such I would consider it part of China for the purpose of this game.
I am a tad confused by your point of it being "separate from Mainland China since 1680". As far as I can tell this is just plain wrong. Wikipedia lists that the two we're joined "20,000 - 30,000 years ... by a land bridge" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Taiwan). As far as I can tell 1680 is about 330 years ago, certainly not 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Anyway this is not how we define countries. If it was we would have one massive Euro-Afro-Asian country, an American country, an Australian country and lots of tiny counties for each of the world islands.
With regards to your final point about couture and religion, this is not how we define a country. If to where then you could never stop drawing increasing smaller and unhelpful lines in the ground in order to take account of local variations. Also if these define countries, then what happens if I move house? Say a hypothetical Indian swaps houses with an American, both continue to live with the respective customs and traditions of their native lands and keep their ordinal religion. Have we created an new enclave & exclave for the US and India? Of course not. And on the same point, if I go on holiday to so somewhere, I don't feel the need to change all my culture and religion to fit into the local population, but I still consider that I am in there country. I haven't temporarily taken control of the land around the villa for a week and claimed it for the UK, it remains with whatever county originally had the land before it was built.