In the old time, while the mainland Chinese can’t access the Internet, the world was different. There were no one cared about the list of “Countries”. Hong Kong was a British colony, Macau was a Portuguese colony, Taiwan is actually an independent country called the Republic of China. No one was care about the “Countries” list that include Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan until the mainland Chinese could finally access the Internet.
After the mainland Chinese accessed the Internet, they complained everywhere, said Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan should be removed from the “Country List” and made so many website follow “their” rules. Then the problem came, as Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are really different from China. We have our own legal system, our own border, our own currency, our own education system, our own International post code, our own International phone code, our own cultures, etc, etc, by definition, we are actually countries, while we were trying to fill in the postal address, we actually could’t find our places. As you know if we just fill in “China”, the postal would never send to the right place as the International postal code really have different places. These had been happened for several years even there are still some sites have this problem nowadays, the credit card address was wrong, the banking address was wrong, the services support region was wrong…
Then we finally found a solution to shut the mainland Chinese mouths, we change the name of “Countries List” to “Countries / Regions List”. But if we forget to “Add” the term “Regions” on the list, they will complain and said Hong Kong and Taiwan are not countries, please add the “Regions” back.
In fact, add the “Regions” or not, it doesn’t change the function of the system, it just for the mainland Chinese feeling good but no one would care about it except the mainland Chinese…