CTA President reiterates Tibet map plan to counter China’s aggression, but no apparent progress after 6 months
By Tenzin Chokyi

DHARAMSALA 17, Jan: Roughly six months after announcing plans for mapping original Tibetan place names to counter China’s cartographic attempts to erase historical Tibetan names, the Central Tibetan Administration(CTA) under Sikyong(President) Penpa Tsering has now announced a new book project to complement the initiative yesterday on CTA’s Instagram handle, Tibetdotnet.
According to the post, the initial phase of the book will focus on documenting township names in their original form with plans to potentially expand its scope to include village names as well.
The book is expected to be finished within a year but due to the complexities and sensitivities surrounding the examination of boundary issues, the Sikyong has told the ANI that the project could take longer to complete.
While many news reports have promoted CTA’s efforts to counter China’s cartographic aggression to erase historical Tibetan names, the original mapping project appears to have made no visible progress since its announcement in July 2024 following the passage of the Resolve Tibet Act by the US Congress.
The President of the CTA told Hindustan Times on Thursday that the mapping project is ongoing and the completion of the project will depend on the level of detail that will be included in the map. However, it appears that the CTA is yet to determine the starting point for the project.“If we restrict it only to townships, the task becomes much easier. Maybe we will begin by focusing on townships and later expand it to include villages, which involves a lot of work,” Sikyong said in the report.
While the CTA’s initiative remains in development, China has made significant strides in promoting its preferred nomenclature. In October 2023, China officially replaced the name Tibet with “Xizang” in all its official documents. This change has progressively influenced Western institutions, including Musée Guimet, the Musée du Quai Branly in France, and the British Museum. The British Museum and the Guitmet Museum to date have not acknowledged the colonial impact of adopting China’s colonial terminology as they referred to Tibet as the “Xizang Autonomous Region” and “Himalayan Region” respectively.
More recently, prominent news media outlets like the Guardian, AFP, ANI, and NDTV, among others, have used the Chinese propaganda term “Xizang” instead of the actual name “Tibet” in their reports on recent earthquakes in occupied Tibet. Other news media outlets like the New York Times, Aljazeera, and VOA have resorted to more nuanced yet still essentialising references such as “Western China,” “China’s Tibet,” and “China” respectively.
The addition of the book component to the grand project of countering China’s politics of nomenclature marks a new direction in what has otherwise been a stagnant initiative.