Taiwan just doesn't rate

TV industry types shoehorned themselves into a small function room in the American Club high above Central last week. The reason was to hear a talk from audience survey specialists Nielson SRG and Ted Turner's TNT & Cartoon Network about the channel's ratings in Taiwan. There were lots of esoteric terms like demographic make-up, people-meter, multi-set homes, universe estimates and establishment surveys. The invited audience learnt, unsurprisingly, that Taiwanese children liked to watch cartoons, along with a sizable number of their parents.

What was not explained was why the map of Asia, which was used as a backdrop for the captions flashed on the screen, seemed to have wiped the island of Taiwan clean off the face of of the Earth, leaving a featureless patch of the Pacific Ocean where most cartographers would normally site the Republic of China.