CTA President, Tibetan NGO’s Callout Media Outlets for Misleading Headlines, calling Tibet “Xizang”
By Tenzin Chokyi
DHARAMSALA, 9 Jan: Penpa Tsering, the Sikyong (President) of the Central Tibetan Administration(CTA), urged the international media outlets to use the term “Tibet” instead of “Xizang” while reporting on the earthquake in Tibet, in his statement after a public prayer service at the Dalai Lama temple to mourn the earthquake’s victim, yesterday.
Prominent news outlets around the world such as 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 the devastating natural calamity which claimed 126 lives and left 188 injured, while 30,000 residents have been evacuated and relocated.
Media outlets like the New York Times, Aljazeera, and VOA have referred to Tibet as “Western China,” “China’s Tibet,” and “China” respectively.
The Sikyong further said, “ It not only has the implication of renaming a place but also in terms of the larger geostrategic importance of what Tibet consists of. So we appeal to the international community not to fall into the trap of Chinese propaganda by using Chinese names for Tibetan places”.
Echoing the same concern, The International Tibet Network, a global coalition of Tibet-related NGO’s has also declared in a joint press statement that “Tibet quake victims need help and not harm.”
Enraged, the coalition has called on the international community – especially governments and media organisations – “ to ensure that the Chinese government does not use its earthquake response as a pretext to further its colonial policies in Tibet”. It further called on news media organisations and governments to “use Tibetan place names in any statements or reporting, both as a matter of historical accuracy and respect for the cultural identity of the Tibetan people, This includes, for example, using Shigatse instead of the Chinese name Xigaze, and Tibet instead of the Chinese name Xizang”.
For the uninitiated, a similar trend in using Chinese colonial terms in media outlets was seen in state-owned English news media and street signs in China before “Tibet” was officially replaced by “Xizang” in all Chinese official documents in October 2023.
According to a report by Tibet Policy Institute(TPI), several Chinese state-owned news media outlets like the China Daily, People’s Daily News and Beijing Review started using the term “Xizang” in the first decade of the 2000s, during which two major international events took place in China: the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the World Exposition in 2010.
Kunga Tashi, a China analyst, on his YouTube channel, stated that the official move to standardised the term was preceded by the Beijing International Seminar on Tibetan Studies in August where scholars called on Beijing to replace “Tibet’ with “Xizang” to reconstruct the image of Tibet in the international discourse.
He further said China’s insecurities about its colonial rule over Tibet were evident in an op-ed released one day after the seminar by the United Front Work Department of China. The op-ed argued that the term Tibet is often misunderstood in the international community as referring to “Greater Tibet” which includes all three traditional provinces of Tibet (U-tsang, Amdo and Kham), grounded in the historical independence of Tibet before 1959 and recognised by the Dalai lama, the exile government and the Tibetan people.
“Xizang,” the Chinese name for Tibet, excludes a major part of Kham and Amdo province of Tibet. China declared their demarcation of Tibet as “Tibet Autonomous Region” in 1965 following the occupation of Tibet by China. To replace “Tibet” with “Xizang” would mean reducing the entire Tibetan civilisation and its history to just an administrative region with a mere history of just 60 years.
