China is slowly erasing Tibet's name
China is slowly erasing Tibet's name
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...
Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5651275
Original link: https://www.newsweek.com/china-changing-tibet-english-name-1843391
Renaming the place you've colonized is a standard settler-colonialist step in the erasure of the indigenous population. Just China being China.
The government of China are not good people... is that controversial?
Tankies hate this one simple truth...
More like CCP is a bunch of goons and criminals - starting with MF Mao, all the way up to Winnie the Xi virus poo.
It's remarkable that Tibetan culture has been so tenacious that there's anything left of it today. If the government of 50 years ago had been able to exert the kind of control over its people that they do today, it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't have been fully eradicated by now.
We're talking about the same Tibet where, throughout history, almost every single major government position has been held by a Tibetan, right?
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.
It really helps if you read the article before posting.
Hey y'all! This thread has sparked a lot of discussion and it is obviously a very tense topic being discussed at a tense time in the world. With the way the thread has been going, the mod team doesn't feel we can moderate this thread thoroughly enough to make it follow our rules, so I am going to lock it.