Olympic politics

I've refrained from commenting on the Taiwan Olympic torch controversy until now, but I thought this map was pretty revealing (then again, I'm heavily biased):


China claims that it's not trying to be political about the torch route, but if so, just looking at the map, wouldn't it make more sense geographically for the torch to pass from North Korea to Taiwan to Vietnam, and then to Hong Kong, rather than going to Vietnam first, and then backtracking to Taiwan?