The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, which began at the University of Cape Town in 2015, initially called for the removal of statues honouring Cecil Rhodes but quickly became a global symbol of resistance to institutional racism and the colonial legacy. Central to these debates was the act of naming and renaming territories, a critical tool of imperial control. Removing colonial names has come to symbolize decolonization and efforts to redress the epistemic violence of colonial rulers.
In recent years, China too has used renaming as a tool of imperial erasure, particularly in Tibet, where it has sought to replace the globally recognized name “Tibet” with “Xizang,” the term used within China for central and western Tibet. Despite China’s claims that Tibet has always been part of its nation, the name “Tibet” evokes the image of a distinct country rather than a region of China. This discrepancy fuels Beijing’s anxiety over international perceptions. Even in Pakistan, a close ally of China, “Tibet” is associated with a distinct entity of snowy mountains and environmental purity, rather than with China. Beijing’s insistent efforts to reshape these associations shows that, at least for Chinese officials, Shakespeare was wrong: the term Xizang does not smell as sweet by any other name.
It is this anxiety that has led China in the last two years to launch a pressure campaign to get foreign businesses, publishers, and mapmakers to adopt the name “Xizang” in place of “Tibet.” When overseas politicians or dignitaries—particularly from debt-laden nations reliant on Chinese aid—visit China or Tibet these days, the Chinese media show them using the term Xizang to refer to Tibet in their public statements: the Tibet word has been cancelled. Such ritualistic acts of compliance both humiliate these visitors and normalize the replacement of Tibet with Xizang in global discourse. Such acts of compliance are emerging in the West now, too. For instance, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris labelled Tibetan artifacts as coming from “Xizang,” while the Musée Guimet re-categorized its Tibetan collections as originating from “the Himalayan world.” Even the British Museum, in the catalogue of its on-going Silk Road exhibition, refers to Lhasa as being in “Tibet or the Xizang Autonomous Region.” In the past China has placed direct pressure on international institutions to comply with its naming requirements – notoriously, in 2023 Beijing demanded that a museum in Nantes omit any references to Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire in an exhibition (the museum rejected those demands) – but in these more recent cases, the western institutions appear to be rushing to placate China in advance, even without coming under direct pressure to do so.
China’s preoccupation with renaming Tibet is not new. In the 1990s, Beijing mandated the use of the phrase “China’s Tibet” in English publications, a clumsy attempt to legitimize its governance over the region. The rebranding extended to popular culture, as seen in the Chinese edition of Tintin in Tibet, which was retitled Tintin in China’s Tibet. That effort backfired, drawing ridicule abroad rather than increased legitimacy for China’s claim over Tibet.
The current push to replace “Tibet” with “Xizang” claims to have a more cerebral justification than just asserting ownership. Its proponents argue that the word “Tibet” is a foreign term imposed as a result of Western colonialism. The historical evidence shows the opposite, however. The term “Tibet” evolved from local usage, centuries before Western colonialism reached Asia. Scholarly explanations of the origin of the word all attribute it to local place names, with most suggesting that the second syllable in the word “Tibet” originated from the indigenous Tibetan term “Bod,” which the Tang dynasty Chinese transliterated as “Tubo.” Over centuries, interactions with neighbouring Turkic and Chinese cultures transformed “Tubo” into “Tibet,” reflecting the region’s historical cross-cultural exchanges. During the Yuan dynasty, the term “Tubo” persisted in official titles, such as the “Tubo Pacification Commissioner.” By contrast, “Xizang” emerged much later, during the Qing dynasty, possibly as a mis-transliteration of the Manchu phrase “Wargi dzang” (Western Tibet). Qing documents occasionally used “Weizang,” derived from the Tibetan term U-Tsang (Central Tibet), but “Xizang” gradually became the standard term in Chinese official records.
In its early years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used Tibetan endonyms such as “Bod” and “Bodpa” in an effort to gain Tibetan support. In 1930s Gyarong, an eastern Tibetan region, the CCP established what they then called the “Bodpa People’s Republic”, since they viewed the term “Xizang” at that time as a legacy of Qing feudalism. However, after coming to power, the CCP reverted to the Qing term and mandated its use in modern Chinese. This shift exemplifies China’s long-standing strategy of using naming as a tool of political control.
China’s demand that the international community adopt “Xizang” mirrors colonial practices of renaming territories to assert dominance. By replacing local or widely recognized names with imperial ones, colonial powers erased Indigenous identities and histories. Similarly, China’s renaming effort aims to subsume Tibetan identity within a Han-centric narrative, erasing the region’s distinct cultural and historical significance and marginalizing Tibetan voices, their heritage, and their sovereignty.
Internationally, the word “Tibet” has become a symbol of a unique identity with significant cultural “soft power,” one which is now seen in China as evoking a sense of separateness that undermines Beijing’s claim to the region. The Chinese campaign to enforce “Xizang” on foreign individuals and institutions invokes the moral high ground of decolonization while seeking to make the international community complicit in China’s claims to sovereignty and its practices of cultural erasure – even though, in fact, the name “Tibet” is not a Western imposition but a term rooted in indigenous usage, dating from interactions between Tibetans and their neighbours over a millennium ago.
If China really wished to decolonize Tibet, it would at the very least promote and celebrate Tibet’s indigenous names and languages, instead of imposing Chinese nomenclature and language on the Tibetan people, and now on foreigners too. Recognizing the name “Tibet” as a product of the region’s own history and distinctiveness would be the smallest step that it could take towards respecting Tibetan cultural sovereignty.
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