China is slowly erasing Tibet's name - Feddit
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The propaganda department of China’s State Council, its central government, last week released a white paper on “Governance of Xizang in the New Era.” Though the term “Tibetan” is used to refer to the region’s people and geographical features like the Tibetan Plateau, Xizang is used exclusively when referring to the southwestern region’s official name. “The Chinese government was desperate enough to propagate Xizang to create a Tibet of Chinese characteristics which is unknown to the world,” Tenzin Lekshay, a spokesperson for the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile, said of Beijing’s report. Lekshay said the Sino-Tibet conflict was long-running and that changing the name would complicate rather than improve the situation.
  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    Renaming the place you’ve colonized is a standard settler-colonialist step in the erasure of the indigenous population. Just China being China.

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        Guess I must be the Tiananmen Guy, because I seem to bring all the Tankies to the yard.

        • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          Bringing up Tiananmen when there are documented instances (with actual evidence) of people getting run over by Israeli tanks and bulldozers in Gaza right now. Backed by the US government. With the US President actively spreading FUD about the scale and extent of atrocities. Nice.

          Xizang is literally the phonetic transliteration for the region of the TAR. You’re basically saying that we should keep the name Western colonialists gave a territory because Western brains would get hurt if the name changed.

  • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    Tibet is the romanized name for the region (based on Latin Tibetum). Tibetans call the Tibetan plateau “Bö” and Central Tibet “Ü-Tsang.”

    The original Tibetan Empire (circa 600-800 or something) stretched across the regions of Amdo (modern-day Qinghai), Ü-Tsang (modern-day Tibet Autonomous Region), and Khan (split between TAR and Sichuan). Xizang is a more or less direct transliteration of Ü-Tsang, the territory that makes up the vast majority of the modern-day TAR.

    Tibet refers to the entire plateau (also referred to as the Qinghai-Xizang plateau or the Himalayan Plateau) and Xizang refers to the territory made up by the TAR. Xizang has, for as long as I can remember, been the Chinese name for the TAR.

    This is manufactured outrage with a clickbait title… About what can be expected from Newsweek.

    Edit: for some additional context, China is usually pretty good about keeping local names. See: Ürümqi (Wulumuqi) from the name of Dzungar village there, Kashgar (Kashigaer/Kashi) which has had the same name for millennia and Harbin (Haerbin) from the name of the Manchu village there (among others). Understandably, because Hui and Uyghurs still live in Urumqi and Kashgar, Manchu still live in Harbin, and Tibetans still live in Xizang.