中东 - "Middle East" or "Eastern China"?

Question

The dictionary lists both Middle East and Eastern China for 中东. Is one of these meanings more common? What would be a native speaker's first impression of the word? Does the meaning vary from mainland, Taiwan, S'pore etc?

UPDATE: I have since removed the meaning "Eastern China" from CC-CEDICT

As Wang Ye mentioned, we use 华东, 华西, 华南, 华北, 华中, 东南, 西南, 东北, 西北 for eastern, western, northern, southern, southeastern, southwestern, northeastern, northeastern of China. — xenophōn, Dec 26 '17 at 12:00
The meaning of Eastern China is probably a historical usage. I can come up with a term 中东铁路 where 中东 literally means Eastern China, and actually refers to Manchuria. — Griffith, Jun 03 '20 at 10:26

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 09 '12 at 06:15

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In all the news reports in Mainland China, "中东" refers to Middle East. This can be seen as a convention -- as a native speaker, if I hear "中东", I will definately think of the Middle East. You can take a look at the Wikipedia Page of 中东, and the Baidu Baike Page of 中东. Only one meaning is referred on both pages -- Middle East.
If anyone wants to refer to Eastern China, they will say "中国东部（地区）". The dictionary lists Eastern China for "中东", which looks like a result from translation software... So the dictionary makes a mistake.

I don't know if 中东 has any other meaning in Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. But when I search for 中东, I also noticed that in Japanese, the combination of these two Characters also refers to Middle East.

answered Feb 09 '12 at 06:15

Dante WWWW

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okay cool.. If might submit an edit to CC-CEDICT then (removing Eastern China) – jsj Feb 09 '12 at 06:17
I think the dictionary makes a mistake as I can't find any clue of using 中东 to describe East China... I personally have never heard anyone using the word like this... – Dante WWWW Feb 09 '12 at 06:23
I edited the dictionary accordingly – jsj Feb 09 '12 at 10:50

Huang · Answer 2 · 2012-02-09T06:45:21.747

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When you only see "中东", that means "the Middle East".

When you want to express the "middle east area of China", you should say"中东部" or "中东部地区", never say "中东". “部”here means "part", so "中东部" gets the meaning of "the middle east part[of this country, China]".

edited Feb 09 '12 at 06:45

answered Feb 09 '12 at 06:22

Huang

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And 中东部地区 != Eastern China. So the dictionary made a mistake. – Dante WWWW Feb 09 '12 at 06:29
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Another word for eastern China, in the narrower sense of the area around Shanghai, is 华东. – Bathrobe Feb 09 '12 at 07:18

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 26 '14 at 06:16

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"中东" means "the Middle East", and "华东" means "Eastern China”

answered Aug 26 '14 at 06:16

Wang Ye

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 27 '14 at 03:59

This phrase is invented by European， east means east from Europe，so the 中东 means middle east from Europe，that is Iraq and some countries ……

There is some other words like 中东，eg，近东（seldom used），远东（referred to Korea,the area between China and Japan.),

远东 is more often replaced by “东亚”。

中东 - "Middle East" or "Eastern China"?

4 Answers4