Beijing Wants to Erase Tibet’s Name. Don’t Let Them.

The pinyin term “Xizang,” as used in China, applies only to the Tibet Autonomous Region, an administrative region that excludes most of Kham and Amdo, two sprawling expanses that are geographically part of the Tibetan plateau and culturally integral parts of the Tibetan nation. In this sense, Xizang is an act of territorial amputation, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that quietly strips Tibet of nearly half its land.

Equally insidious, renaming Tibet as Xizang is a way of permanently severing the link between Tibet (the homeland) and its people (Tibetans). Consider the slogan: “Tibet belongs to Tibetans,” a sentiment that is tacitly recognized even in the CCP’s initial promise to make Tibetans “masters of their own house.” In sharp contrast, Xizang is now spoken of as a multiethnic, integral part of China. The phrase “China’s Xizang is a multiethnic region” not only strips Tibetans of their ancestral home but also legitimizes Han settler colonialism and the gradual dwindling of the Tibetan people’s demographic dominance, from 97 percent in 1964 to 86 percent in the 2020 TAR census.

According to the late sociologist Anthony D. Smith, national identity derives from an “ethnic core,” with ethnicity being the nucleus around which nations develop. Smith argued that an ethnic community must have certain foundational characteristics: a collective proper name, a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, some elements of common culture, ties to a specific homeland, and a sense of solidarity. While each of these traits is important to the constitution of an ethnic group, the essential starting point is a collective proper name. Without a name, there is no ethnic group nor national homeland.

Erasing the toponym Tibet brings the Chinese government one step closer to its ultimate goal of expunging the Tibetan demonym, leaving Tibetans without a collective proper name to rally around. Tibet is thus reduced merely to a constituent part of “China” and Tibetans, part of the “Chinese nation.” The CCP is thereby terminating not only the Tibetan people’s status as a nation but their existence as an ethnic group.

If China succeeds in its mission to rename the Tibetan homeland, Tibetans may continue to exist as individuals but will cease to exist as a collective. Once stripped of their collective identity, they would lose the basis upon which to make even modest claims to collective rights, such as minority accommodation or language protection within the PRC, let alone the promise of national self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Charter or regional autonomy laid out in the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement.

Peripheralizing Tibetan Civilization

Yet the Chinese government asserts that the name change is an act of decolonization, claiming that the name “Tibet” is of foreign origin and devoid of local roots. In truth, though, Beijing is exploiting the language of decolonization to camouflage its own colonial designs. “Tibetan aside, all modern languages except Chinese refer to the entire cultural and historic realm of the Tibetans with a variant of the name Tibet,” wrote the late historian Elliot Sperling. “And in those other languages the rigid distinctions engendered in modern Chinese that are deployed in support of China’s political definition of Tibet and Tibetans don’t apply.”

Furthermore, there is wide consensus among Tibetologists of all stripes that the name Tibet is a derivative of “Tho-Bod,” which in turn is derived from “Bod,” the indigenous term that Tibetans have used to refer to their homeland for as long as anyone can remember. If Beijing was genuinely motivated by the noble cause of decolonization, it would have gone with the indigenous Bod instead of the foreign Xizang, the latter being a legacy of Manchu-Qing expansionism (1644–1911) and Chinese colonialism.

For most of the world, the name Tibet evokes the ancient nation’s long and rich precolonial history, with its distinct language, unique geography, and vibrant culture. Situated at the center of the Bon-Buddhist civilization rather than on the periphery of a Sinitic-Confucian one, Tibet’s philosophical traditions and cultural influences have flowed outward to Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and other Himalayan and steppe regions for centuries. As the historian Tsering Shakya notes, the term Tibet evokes the nation’s separate past as a “distinct country rather than a region of China.” Renaming Tibet as Xizang allows Beijing to erase Tibet’s historical position at the heart of a distinct plateau civilization, thus setting the stage for subsuming it into the monocultural universe of Han hegemony.

International Response and Resistance

Beijing’s directive to rename Tibet is gaining traction. Not only among states located in China’s immediate sphere of influence but also among elite cultural institutions in the West, which are increasingly censoring themselves to appease the Chinese government. The prime minister of Nepal, for example, referred to Tibet as Xizang in an official statement following his visit to China last year, while Pakistan’s deputy prime minister expressed sadness over “the devastating earthquake that struck Xizang” this year. Perhaps most strikingly, Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom that shares strong cultural and linguistic ties with Tibet, also used the term Xizang in a recent statement.

Equally concerning has been the willingness of Western cultural institutions to anticipate and align with Beijing’s discourse. Last year, two major museums in France — despite the country’s traditionally pro-Tibet public — dropped the name Tibet in exhibit materials. The Musée du Quai Branly adopted Xizang, while the Musée Guimet used the more neutral-sounding “Himalayan world.” Similarly, the British Museum, in an exhibit that opened last September, labeled Tibetan artifacts as originating from the “Tibet or Xizang Autonomous Region.”

These developments triggered global protests by Tibetan communities and advocacy groups. In January, Penpa Tsering, president of the Tibetan government in exile, urged international media to reject Beijing’s directive and continue using Tibet, warning against falling “into the trap of Chinese propaganda by using Chinese names for Tibetan places.” Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) echoed this call, cautioning against complicity in “erasing Tibet from the media, museums, and maps.”

A coalition of local organizations and international advocacy groups mobilized public pressure on the museums. In Paris, local Tibetans and SFT staged weekly protests, published op-eds, and enlisted prominent French politicians to the cause, escalating reputational risks for these institutions. Bowing to the pressure, the Musée du Quai Branly issued an apology and promised to restore the name Tibet in its catalogues. The British Museum followed suit in February. Academics and journalists are also playing a critical role in influencing the outcome of this lexical battle. By continuing to use the term Tibet in their work, they help preserve the region’s historical and cultural integrity while resisting China’s colonial ambition of civilizational erasure.

What’s in a Name?

In The Analects, Confucius wrote that “if names are not correct, speech will not be in accordance with the truth of things.” Yet Beijing’s act of “rectifying names” is not principally about the alignment of language and reality but rather political control. Power over language is power over moral order and legitimacy.

The shift from Tibet (a name saturated with associations of civilizational richness, political resistance, and international sympathy) to Xizang (a sterile, bureaucratic PRC exonym) is a textbook case of rectifying names to increase the CCP’s discourse dominance internationally. It attempts to overwrite the historical and affective power of the word Tibet and replace it with something that affirms PRC sovereignty and administrative normalcy.

This is not unique to Tibet: The same logic applies when the Party claims that “Taiwan is a province of China” or uses the phrase “China’s Diaoyu Islands” rather than Senkaku or Diaoyutai Islands, as they are known in Japan and Taiwan. But with Tibet, the stakes are existential because of how deeply the international narrative is tied to contested sovereignty, cultural survival, and colonial critique. The Party’s insistence on Xizang isn’t merely lexical; it actively forecloses alternative political imaginaries. If the world comes to accept Xizang as the norm, then the question of Tibetan sovereignty and self-determination becomes linguistically illegible. On the battlefield of naming, the Tibetan people cannot afford to lose.