Fedora Internationalization: Hacked by Chinese?

[Gregory Maxwell]

A friend of mine directed me to a recent blog entry of his:
http://iblog.chomped.org/index.php?p=108

Fedora ships with the flags removed from the KDE keyboard mapping
selector. This causes a practical issue for users that switch between
US and US/international bindings which could be resolved in some way
other than the flags.

What I find interesting is that his bugzilla entry for the issue
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=164705) was
closed as a duplicate of a bug which is not publicly available
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=70235).

It appears, from Ian's blog entry, that the flags were removed as a
result of pressure from the Chinese government because the included
flag set included a Taiwanese flag. I can't confirm this because I
can't actually see that bug.

If this is actually the case, I find it somewhat concerning: Making
decisions to diverge from upstream in secret as a result of such
pressure will only serve to substantiate the concerns of those who are
worried that Free Software will be used to suppress human rights, and
whom wish to further bifurcate the state of free software licensing by
introducing additional license restrictions to inhibit such behavior
by distributors.

The Taiwan/China issue is nuanced and complex, and certainly not as
simple of a matter as Ian makes it out to be...  But I agree with him
that this feels wrong. I'd like to know if his statements about the
reason for this change are correct, and why was this change undertaken
behind closed doors?

  I'll leave it to the professional paranoids to dream up slippery
slope scenarios.