(TibetanReview.net, Oct15’23) – Following a foreign ministry readout which used ‘Xizang’ as the official Chinese translation for Tibet Autonomous Region, Chinese e-commerce platform Weidian has advised millions of merchants to stop using ‘Tibet’ in English product descriptions or face removal, reported the scmp.com Oct 15.
Historical “Tibet” refers to the roughly 2.5 million square kilometre area that encompasses the Dotoe (or Kham), Domey (or Amdo) and U-Tsang traditional provinces of the Tibetan territory that is now under fully Chinese rule.
However, “Xizang” or “China’s Tibet” (or Tibet Autonomous Region) refers only to the roughly 1.5 million square kilometre territory in the western section of Tibet proper. As regards the rest of the historical Tibetan territory, China demarcated them at different times as Qinghai Province and as parts of its Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces through annexation and merger.
Weidian, China’s version of Shopify, enables small and midsized entrepreneurs to set up online stores. According to its official website, Weidian operates more than 90 million online retail outlets with a trading volume of 100 billion yuan (US$13.7 billion), the report noted.
The platform has warned merchants their products would be removed if they displayed the word “Tibet”, although no deadline has been mentioned.
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The announcement was stated to have cited a foreign ministry English readout of an address by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a trans-Himalayan forum in Tibet on Oct 5, which used “Xizang” as the official translation for Tibet.
Earlier, in Aug 2023, Chinese academics called on Beijing during a conference to ditch the term “Tibet” to help give Beijing an edge in the global discourse about the region.
Following it, the United Front Work Department, a body responsible for dealing with non-party individuals and groups both inside and outside China, had said on its WeChat account in August that the issue was also political, not just linguistic. It reasoned that the word “Tibet” misleads the international community, since it could be confused with the term “Greater Tibet”, the term used by China for historical Tibet as referred to by Tibetans in exile and others.
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The report noted that the word “Xizang” has been used in Chinese state media such as the Global Times and the English version of People’s Daily since 2019, while CGTN and Xinhua News Agency gradually followed suit.
To date, all the media outlets continued to use both names. The same is also true of China’s foreign ministry website, although it appeared to use “Xizang” far less than “Tibet”, the report added.
It further said an English-language Xinhua readout of remarks by a Chinese envoy to the United Nations published on Wednesday (Oct 11) used “Xizang” instead of “Tibet”.
However, while many Chinese netizens welcomed the move, saying the change from the English name could boost China’s cultural confidence and help resist political pressure from Western countries, others have rejected the order, calling it an excessive measure, the report noted.
“Following this logic, the English name of our country can be changed to its pinyin, Zhongguo, and Xianggang to replace Hong Kong,” one user was stated to have written on the microblog platform Weibo.