(TibetanReview.net, Dec10’23) – China not only avoided using “Tibet” to refer to Tibet or Tibet Autonomous Region in the latest white paper on Tibet it issued on Nov 10, but its official media has dramatically increased the use of the term “Xizang” in its place since then, noted the scmp.com Dec 10. Replacing “Tibet” with Xizang” is meant to assert China’s sovereignty and discourse power over Tibet in the latest phase of its Sinicization move.
“Xizang” is the pinyin, or Chinese romanisation, of the Mandarin script for “Tibet”.
“Tibet” as generally understood, refers to the contiguous historical Tibetan territory comprised by around 2.5 million sq km of land inhabited by the Tibetan people. It is made up of three large traditional Tibetan provinces of Dotoe (or Kham), Domey (or Amdo) and U-Tsang. However, to China, this Tibet does not exist anymore following its armed invasion and annexation of the country over 1949-51 and so should no longer be used.
To it, “Tibet” only means Xizang or Xizang Autonomous Region, comprised by roughly the western half of Tibet proper and which it previously – after 1951 – referred to simply as Tibet or Tibet Autonomous region. As regards the eastern half of Tibet proper, they now make up the Qinghai province and parts of Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of the People’s Republic of China.
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Since the release of its white paper, “Xizang” has largely replaced “Tibet” in several official Chinese media reports, with “Tibet” now used only in a few scenarios, including translations of already established geographical terms and names of institutions, noted the scmp.com report.
It said that between Nov 10, the date of the white paper’s release, and Friday (Dec 8), the English-language website of state news agency Xinhua used “Xizang” in 128 articles, while only five used “Tibet”, all of which were in reference to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the geographic term covering most of the Tibet autonomous region.
But before that, through 2023 up to Nov 10, search results on Xinhua’s English website showed more than 700 results with the word “Tibet”, suggesting that the term was used in a variety of scenarios, including political and economic coverage, while “Xizang” appeared only around 30 times, the report said.
The same was seen to be the case with the English website of People’s Daily, the party’s mouthpiece, which used both “Xizang” and “Tibet” before Nov 10, with the former appearing less than one-fifth as often as the latter. But from the release of the white paper until Friday (Dec 8), “Tibet” appeared only in one reposted article from another media outlet and in scenarios where English translations were already fixed, such as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Tibet University, while “Xizang” was seen used more than four times as often as “Tibet”.
China Daily, the English-language mouthpiece newspaper, is seen to have used “Xizang” along similar lines to the above two media outlets after Nov 10.
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The reported cited Chinese Experts as saying the change reflects Beijing’s emphasis on the sovereignty of Tibet and its efforts to exercise discourse power. However, it is likely to have little impact on how the international community refers to the region, the report added.
The move is seen as part of Beijing’s move to foster what President Xi Jinping has called a “sense of community for the Chinese nation”. Its purpose is to strengthen national identity in ethnic minority regions, and one way to achieve this is to promote what Beijing calls “standard spoken and written Chinese” – Mandarin.
In this connection, Robert Barnett, a professor and senior research fellow at SOAS University of London who specialises in contemporary Tibetan history and culture, has said the attempt to change Tibet’s English name was part of Beijing’s policy drive to exercise its “discourse power” by “insisting on Chinese terms and frameworks” in media discussions.
He has also stressed that the term “Xizang” might not be popular outside China.