> If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are.
A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
> Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades.
Can you provide information or citations for this?
> China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5".
That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see <https://explainxkcd.com/977> for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
> But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.