Wonders of China
All three Chinese wonders were translated with their correct Chinese names: the Forbidden Palace (紫禁城), the Great Wall (万里长城), Sun Tzu's Art of War (孙子兵法). But usual business of substituting Jiudingguo and Beidu for China and Beijing respectively still applies, which is a shame given that the Chinese have the most wonders in the game after the Greeks, Americans, and English.
Although in case of Sun Tzu they slipped up, and one mention of '
Chinese' was left uncensored as
中国.
Techs about China
A few tech descriptions in the original game mention the Chinese (gunpowder, pottery, map making; probably there is some more I missed). There is no much point in going through all of them but there is one interesting detail I caught with the pottery tech. The last clause
'...the Ming dynasty in 14th century China' was translated as 14世纪的
九鼎国火朝 which, in turn, translates to
'the Fire dynasty of the 14th century Nine Tripods State'.
As some may have known, in the traditional Chinese culture there is a concept of five elements (五行 wuxing) - fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. This concept has had a wide range of use from astrology to alchemy, and was also applied to the Chinese dynasties superseding one another. The difficult part for scholars was establishing association between any given dynasty and one of the five elements as there were frequent disputes regarding legitimacy of preceding dynasties.
I searched for sources about this subject in relation to Ming's dynastic element, and found a 2014 paper
'Legitimation Discourse and the Theory of the Five Elements in Imperial China'. It says that at least initially, shortly before and after the establishment of the dynasty in the 14th century, Ming claimed fire as its element. It is obvious that the translator who worked on pottery entry in Civilopedia was well-educated in traditional Chinese historiography. It would be highly improbable to be just a coincidence.
The whole matter with replacing proper names related to China with suitable phonetic and semantic substitutes kinda reminds me of the traditional practice of naming taboo (避諱): as characters in ruling emperors' names were banned from everyday use, people had to be inventive and find ways around these restrictions.
My top question is, what would the reason be to censor China itself?
The Chinese govt provides no strict guidelines on what it allows or censors. In short, there is no way of knowing it but I'm happy to share my speculations. I think the problem is with the
Civilopedia entry on the Chinese civilization: from the starting sentence
'Despite political and social upheavals that frequently ravaged the country, China is unique for its longevity and resilience as a politico-cultural entity.' all the way to
'In 1966, the Communists launched the disastrous “Cultural Revolution,” a ten-year assault on “traditional values” and “bourgeois thinking” which ultimately left the country in disarray.' I mean it's pretty obvious why the CCP would never allow that.
If no censor can vet this article, but you also can't leave China without history what should you do? Write another, more positive and one-sidedly pro-China? If so, there is no telling what topics you must and must never touch, and how you word them. Given how sensitive the topic of history is to the CCP it's just not worth touching it even with a 10-foot pole. So I guess they figured it's easier to just pretend it's not actually China altogether.
Also, I think the very concept of the game where you could rule the Chinese people, choose for them different socioeconomic formations to live in, and compare their efficacy is a big no.
My current theory is that perhaps self-promotion of the country would have been seen as too nationalist at the time (early 2000s)?
China is absolutely nationalist and is self-promoting. Even the innocuous sentence
'The casting of bronze and the development of an alphabet date from the period of the Shang dynasty, China’s first,' wouldn't pass, since for a long time the Chinese academia and education system has taken it for a fact that China's first dynasty is Xia (which predates Shang by several centuries) despite the lack of archaeological evidence that would allow to identify Erlitou culture as Xia.
Can you play the Chinese version side-by-side with other localizations of Civ III?
You can, yeah. In case of PtW it doesn't even require the prior installation of the Chinese vanilla version: it installs English Civ 3 v. 1.29f , and on top that Chinese PtW 1.14f.
In PtW They didn't translate the scenarios that were shipped with PtW so I can demonstrate English and Chinese fonts together with Teturkhan scenario, for example:
