Why China Drops "Tibet" for "Xizang"

Name alteration of the country's plateau region sparks controversy

The Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of Xizang Autonomous Region, March 15, 2020. (Xinhua/Pubu Zhaxi)

Formerly referred to as “Tibet,” China’s southwesternmost administrative region now comes out in official publications as “Xizang,” as spelled in China’s standard transliteration system for Roman letters known as pinyin. There were already signs last May, when an annual forum held by China’s State Council Information Office cast aside the old expression and was thus renamed “2023 Xizang Development Forum.” A thorough overhaul came last November when the same office published a white paper on China’s ruling party’s policies on the governance of the region, and nearly all Chinese media have since uniformly adopted “Xizang” as the official English spelling of the far western frontier region.

This move, unsurprisingly, has been subject to the hyping of conspiracy theories. As narrated by a piece in Wall Street Journal this January, “the shift dovetails with a broad assimilation drive targeted at China’s ethnic minorities and outlying regions that has intensified under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.” Members of the Tibetan secessionist group in exile appeared on Radio Free Asia and Radio France Internationale, two government-sponsored propaganda organs, and called the naming of Xizang part of Beijing’s move “towards uniculturalism” that is set to destroy the Tibetan “very identity from language to religion.” Bitter Winter, a self-vaunted watcher on religious freedom, also launched fierce criticism with an etymological review as early as 2021, when the Chinese media Global Times briefly applied the use of “Xizang.”

Renaming or Restoration?

Why is “Tibet” no longer in use officially? And where does “Xizang” come from? To answer these questions, it is worth revisiting the changes along the way in the official Chinese discourse.

Xinhua News Agency, the Beijing-based official newswire, is long known as China’s authoritative source of the officially recognized expressions in most of the languages, English included. It was based on the abrupt change of the region’s English spelling in Xinhua articles before and after last November that a piece published in South China Morning Post ventured to aver that Beijing has formally embraced “Xizang.” However, a more thorough research through the Xinhua database would suggest differently. In fact, the alleged shift took place nearly half a century ago, and in a much less ostentatious manner.

Arguably the first-ever Xinhua article that referred to the region as “Xizang” was titled “How to spell place names in the Chinese pinyin system,” published on December 27, 1978. It was in effect an official notice that the country would henceforth “adopt the Chinese phonetic alphabet (pinyin) system instead of the presently-used Wade-Giles spelling in the romanization of Chinese place names on January 1, 1979.” The piece included an exhaustive list of China’s well-known places in the old and new spelling. Manifestly on that list, what had previously been spelled as the “Tibet Autonomous Region” was changed to “Xizang Autonomous Region.” It is to be noted that it was a sweeping revamp that covered almost all the place names nationwide. For instance, “Soochow” was changed to “Suzhou,” “Fukien” to “Fujian,” “Sinkiang” to “Xinjiang,” and “Peking” to “Beijing.” That is to say, “Xizang” was meant to be adopted since 1979 as part of a wholesale name correction drive not specifically targeted at this plateau region.

The legal basis for such a move could be further traced two decades back. In 1958, the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, approved the “Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” at the state level, initiating the process of replacing an array of imported spelling systems with the indigenous one. This scheme was officially recognized by the United Nations through a resolution in 1977, which recommended pinyin as the “international system for the romanization of Chinese geographical names.” In September 1978, China cabinet-esque State Council adopted a report as an executive order that promoted the pinyin scheme as the unified standard. This order was later, three months to be exact, followed by the aforementioned Xinhua article that announced the shift from “Tibet” to “Xizang.”

“According to either the domestic legislation or the international practice, the standard Chinese phonetic alphabet known as the pinyin system is China’s only way of communication in terms of external exchanges,” said Liang Junyan, a research fellow at China Tibetology Research Center.

Even though, what happened afterwards was apparently a tug-of-war between the urge to effect that change and the need to adapt to reality. News stories from Xinhua started to apply the expression “Xizang” during the year 1979, though many still came with bracketed “Tibet” to ease the transition for foreign audiences. However, the conversion process took an abrupt halt, with no search results that came with “Xizang” surfacing during the year 1980. Most of the Xinhua stories that came out thereafter only used the new spelling to refer to the “Qinghai-Xizang Plateau” or long-established proper nouns like “Xizang Minzu University,” rather than the autonomous region per se. It appeared that China’s official newswire, along with many government agencies, didn’t follow through on the change with rigor, for the sake of catering to overseas audience’s reading habits. The “change” that took place recently is essentially a resumption of the reform 45 years ago.

“We have never officially endorsed the expression of ‘Tibet.’ We condoned the usage of this inaccurate translation by Westerners just for the sake of better communication with them,” said Lajia Dangzhou, an associate professor of ethnic Tibetan at Sichuan Minzu College. “From ‘Tibet’ to ‘Xizang,’ it is not renaming, but restoration.”

Etymological Contest

Although the name change was due quite some time ago, the legitimacy of this move is still contested from an etymological perspective. A professor of Mongolian origin at a Japanese University told Radio Free Asia that using “Chinese language to express the terms inherent to each ethnic group” is a testament to China’s open defying its own principle of “the name follows the owner.” Assuming this principle is valid, the defining issue lies in the question: which one of the two terms, “Tibet” or “Xizang,” has been historically used by Tibetans to describe the region?

“‘Tibet’ has always been a word the outsiders use to refer to what we know as Xizang, where the local residents have never identified with the term,” said Lajia Dangzhou. “Besides, ‘Tibet’ was used to vaguely characterize an area that is geographically different from today’s administrative region. There is a gap between the Western fantasy and the reality of Xizang.”

To be more precise, “Tibet,” along with its variants in other Western languages, didn’t directly originate from the Tibetan language. It came from foreign tongues, not to describe a certain geographical location, but to address the group of people now known as Tibetans. According to the research by the distinguished Tibetologist Chen Qingying, the phrase “Tibet” most likely first came from the way Turks and Mongols called Tibetans, who then generally called themselves “bod,” and the Europeans adopted the nomadic peoples’ pronunciation via Arabs during the 13th and 14th century. Another theory traces “Tibet” to China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907), when the Chinese literature back then referred to Tibetans as “吐蕃,” which could be either pronounced as “tufan” or “tubo.” Either way, “Tibet” was a word derived from a nomenclature used by a certain group of people whose native tongues were alien to the Tibetans.

“In today’s Tibetan language, ‘Pöba’ refers to the ethnic group of Tibetans, but not the region. ‘Xizang’ is the accurate geographical concept,” said Lajia Dangzhou.

Although “Tibet” was first introduced to the Western languages as an ethnic concept, it was later applied as a geographical idea as the original textual meaning faded away. In various contexts and from different political standpoints, this word could refer to the autonomous region in question, or sometimes a much broader geographical space inhabited by ethnic Tibetans. The fact that the word “Tibet” could mean different things in different contexts has been echoed by Melvyn Goldstein, a heavyweight American Tibetologist, who believes there is a “political Tibet” and also an “ethnographic Tibet.”

According to Lian Xiangmin, the former deputy director general of China Tibetology Research Center, “When Westerners use the term ‘Tibet,’ they often point their fingers towards a huge region that includes not only Xizang, but also the Tibetan-residing counties in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai. The secessionist group led by Dalai Lama even tried to incorporate a large part of Xinjiang into this concept. This is far beyond the scope of the Xizang Autonomous Region that we are talking about.”

Such confusion has been taken advantage of by the Tibetan secessionist forces, which created the notion of the “Greater Tibet,” spanning 2.4 million square km and more than five times the size of the Xizang Autonomous Region. While Dalai Lama’s clique, packed with Tibetan exiles, called for “genuine autonomy” for this “Greater Tibet,” this region has never been fully placed under the rule of successive Dalai Lama’s theocratic regimes.

“Xizang,” in stark contrast, is not as politically driven. The term is not only directly derived from the Tibetan language, but also a word that unequivocally refers to the geographical area that frames the shape of today’s autonomous region.

The origin of the phrase “Xizang” was “Dbus-Gtsang,” the Tibetan name for the core area of the Kingdom of Tubo (or Tufan), which existed from the 7th to 9th century. “Dbus” means the “central part” in Tibetan, referring to the region surrounding today’s Lhasa. “Gtsang” means “the banks of the upper reaches of Yarlung Zangbo River,” referring to the area near Xigaze. These two areas compose the main part of today’s Xizang Autonomous Region, which also includes Ngari and the western part of Kham. The phrase “Dbus-Tsang” survived the collapse of this Tibetan kingdom, and has since been used as geographical terminology.

“Dbus-Tsang” was first translated into Mandarin Chinese as “Weizang” (卫藏), before it gradually morphed into “Xizang” (西藏) since the mid-16th century. While there are competing theories on how this transformation unfolded, it is certain that “Xizang” almost completely superseded “Weizang” in official Chinese expression during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In the late 1720s, when the Oirat rebels had been defeated, the central government of the Qing Dynasty ordered high-ranking officials to delineate the regional boundaries of Xizang, and this administrative division largely remained intact till today. When the People’s Republic of China founded the autonomous region based on the historical precedence in 1965, it was naturally named “Xizang.”

Sovereign Right

Aside from the etymological legitimacy of “Xizang,” the fact that China is criticized for altering a place name within its own sovereign purview seems baffling to most Chinese.

“Mandarin Chinese is the standard spoken and written language in China. It is not only a nation’s legal duty to use it to express domestic proper place names, but it is also an internationally accepted practice,” said Lian Xiangmin.

China has a record of honoring other nations’ sovereign right in this regard. In 2021, the Turkish government requested the international community to refer to its country as “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey.” Chinese mainstream news outlets conformed to the name change, despite that most of their Western counterparts brushed off the Turkish demand. In 2005, China acceded to the request by South Korea to switch the Chinese spelling of Seoul from “Hancheng” (汉城), a time-honored name frequenting Chinese historical records, to “Shou’er” (首尔), an expression more phonetically akin to the Korean language. Beijing powered through this tradition-busting change despite the uproar and confusion among the Chinese public.

“The Chinese government’s change in Tibet’s English name does not reflect a stance on ethnicity but on sovereignty,” said Barry Sautman, an emeritus professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, during an interview with the South China Morning Post. “It is to vindicate the sovereign right to use a term derived from China’s official language for a part of China’s territory.”

The Tibetan secessionist movement has long been used by Washington as leverage against Beijing. This could be traced back to 1959, when Dalai Lama went into exile with the alleged support of the CIA. Recently, a political stunt known as “Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act” is being pushed in the U.S. Congress, which denies that “Tibet has been a part of China since ancient times.” The Act aligns its own definition of “Tibet,” not with China’s autonomous region, but with the separatists’ “Greater Tibet” claim.

The self-anointed “Greater Tibet,” which takes up one-quarter of China’s territory, has never been acknowledged by the Chinese government, because it is not only invalid in terms of today’s administrative divisions, but also extremely unreasonable considering the ethnographic distribution. This enormous region has been historically inhabited by an array of ethnic groups other than Tibetans, such as Mongols, Hui, Qiang, Menba, Sala, etc. Such a claim, co-sponsored by Tibetan secessionists and Washington, would appear more irredentist than Hitler’s territorial assertion over Sudetenland.

“Xizang has a population of more than three million, most of whom have never even heard of the English word ‘Tibet,’” said Lajia Dangzhou. “Our choice of the proper translation of place names should be based on the people’s need for convenience in production and life. Most of the ethnic Tibetans, however inadequately they might master Mandarin Chinese, have one word deeply rooted in their heart: Xizang.”

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Subscribe to Sinical China for more original pieces to help you read Chinese news between the lines. Xu Zeyu, founder of Sinical China, is a senior correspondent with Xinhua News Agency, China’s official newswire. Follow him on X (Twitter) @XuZeyu_Philip

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