"China" unlisted regional/revenue/Japanese occupation/?

Giant panda’s modern appellation in the variation of Chinese language I have learned and in the area I am originally from is「貓熊」-- with the first character literally meaning ‘cat’, and the second character meaning ‘bear’ (in this case the noun ‘cat’ functions somewhat like a pre-modifier to describe the noun ‘bear’) -- whereas the reverse「熊貓」is used to refer to red panda (in this case the noun ‘bear’ is the modifier). Rough translation would be:

「貓熊」= cat-like bear = giant panda
「熊貓」= bear-like cat = red panda

Since I have a terrible reputation for word inversion, the way I came to terminate the long-term confusion and remember each species’ respective name was by teaching myself, not very long ago, that giant pandas were bears instead of something else -- and this something else being domestic cats. Insofar as the kind of ‘childhood education’ I have received is concerned, we were taught to exercise great care in discerning the potential discrepancy between the taxonomic result based on scientific investigation and the common belief inferred from unreliable naming custom. For instance, not all aquatic animals whose common names contain the character ‘fish’ (魚) are actually fishes (e.g. whales 鯨魚, octopus 章魚); and if we were to assume that naive view of a name as of possessing a fixed essence, we would probably be prone to group giant pandas (貓熊), bears (熊), raccoons (浣熊), and koala (無尾熊) into the family Ursidae, or at least treat them as close kins to one another, since the Chinese appellations for all theses animals contain the very same character「熊」, meaning bears. (Judging from their names, again, raccoons and bears would not be distinguishably distant.)

I gather that in the English speaking world, etymology is not a common root for misconception, which, if ever arisen, can be easily shattered by all the reachable information readily available at our disposal nowadays; yet in another cultural context, naming is sometimes given a central importance, especially if people believe animals were thus named for a definitive purpose by our ancestors of real intellectual distinction. ‘Systematic’ lies of this kind are so prevailing that the eventual realisation of our ignorance is not likely to inflict upon us dramatic distress -- in my experience at any rate, that penguins are actually (flightless) birds is, I think, the biggest surprise which came out of my secret learning of biological taxonomy. Throughout my adolescence, I was misled into believing that they were marine mammals.

A last episode involving pandas: In Mainland China, however, pandas are commonly called ‘bear-cats’「熊貓」because of a unfortunate mistake according to a story popularised by Beijing Zoo [1]. It seems that they were originally named ‘cat-bears’ following the first discovery in 1869 by the French missionary Armand David. During an exhibition in China in the 30’s, panda’s common name was printed, along with its scientific name, horizontally from left to right when the custom of reading Chinese language was from right to left, therefore ‘bear-cat’ was born from this widespread misreading of the original name by the ‘ignorant masses’. Taiwan is said to be the only place where the name ‘cat-bear’ is still retained. (Traditionally, Chinese characters are written in vertical columns from top to bottom of the page and ordered from right to left. The modern practice of printing sentences in horizontal rows with a left-to-right pattern is due to the increased influence from European culture which uses alphabetic writing system.)

Another account of the divergence in the naming of pandas draws something from the grammatical difference between dialects. Some people argue that in a number of regional variations, contrary to the tradition I was taught, the modifier is placed after the noun to be described (so it’s a post-modifier). Whether or not this account has any historical or linguistic merit should be left to someone who is better versed in human languages to judge, and this person can surely not be me.

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[1] This is the explanation given by Beijing Zoo:
www.flickr.com/photos/rayyu/3039031261/sizes/l/in/set-72157609241936350/