What? Google makes a custom political map for China? A couple of years ago, they used to claim that they don't make custom products for any market and product rollouts are always worldwide.
Note that it's not just a matter of translation. First, they list Taiwan next to Hong Kong and Macau as if it's a peripheral part of China (this is surely China's wish, but the reality is that Taiwan is an independent democracy).
Then, there's a line in the water to the east of Taiwan and extending elsewhere whose sole purpose is to imply regions to be part of China's territory that are not or are controversial. This line isn't used anywhere else in the world, such as say, in the Caribbean, where the boundaries of different islands might not be clear.
I guess Google wants market share in China bad enough that they are willing to proffer multiple versions of truth.
I actually had something specifically in mind. Google Taiwan had to fight to get special options onto the search page that could limit searches to Taiwanese websites ( http://www.google.com.tw/ ). Otherwise, most Mandarin language searches would be overwhelmed by results from China. The strong resistance they encountered at the time was that Google insisted on products being rolled out worldwide in a single version, minus minor variations like translations.
It's also a question of ethics in this case. This is about data that Google is directly providing, not simply a matter of ranking or showing/not showing websites in their results. It's not serving the user a purple background because they like purple. Think about another possible case--would it be right for Google to draw Israel as occupied Palestine in countries where the majority of people might hold that point of view?
http://ditu.google.com/