Looking for an easy way to separate Taiwan and Hong Kong from China on a simple countries shapefile.

Question

Hello. I'm a beginner ArcMap user so this is probably a stupid question... any help much appreciated.

I'm looking for a way to separate Hong Kong and Taiwan from China in a Generalized Country Borders shapefile. They all occur under the one entry 'China', for obvious reasons.

I downloaded a separate shapefile for Hong Kong and attempted to join it to the Generalized Country Borders shapefile by first using it to essentially erase a space for itself and then use the Union tool to join the layers together. This kind of worked, but the results were messy. I wasn't able to find an appropriate shapefile for Taiwan.

I get the feeling that I'm way off track here.. Can anyone please help me?

JeremyHauw · Answer

Thanks, Stephen!

I think you're probably right.. I think I can't do it on this file, though - it looks to be locked.

It seems to allow some editing, but won't allow the explode tool to be used on it.

I'll try to find an unlocked file I can explode.

Thanks so much for your help!

StephenM · Answer

The Explode tool might be what you're looking for:

Separating a multipart feature (Explode)—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Explode a multipart feature—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop