Originally Posted by
go_around
Counting Hong Kong and Macau separately from China opens a can of worms... the question is how many countries people have visited. Not "jurisdictions" or "areas with separate passport control". Taiwan may be legitimately counted on the basis that there is reasonable disagreement on whether it's a separate country, but HK and Macau are not separate countries under any understanding.
I agree that it's iffy to count Hong Kong and Macau now. But I visited them back when they were colonies of Britain and Portugal. And another factor to count is that they have their own country codes for telecom and internet. So that makes them a bit more of a jurisdiction. Those country codes were assigned by the United Nations.