 Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Dmitry Kosyrev
[RIA] It all started with material that went around many media outlets: after the State Council (government) of China published the “White Paper” last month. regarding Tibet, Beijing has stopped calling it Tibet and instead uses the word "Xizang". The calculations began: before the book was published, Tibet was mentioned 700 times in the official media, and after that it was all about Xizang.
A similar incident (i.e. confusion) occurred in Russia in 1997, when Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony and was returned to China. In Russian writing circles, not particularly literate philological Nazis began to rage, claiming that the Beijing authorities had authoritarianly renamed Hong Kong to Hong Kong and everyone should now write only Hong Kong in Russian. Although in fact no one renamed anything, just two characters meaning “fragrant bay” were and are read in northern, state Chinese as Hong Kong, and in the southern dialect they also sound like Hong Kong.
But no one renamed Tibet either. In Chinese for a very long time it has been precisely Xizang, that is, “Western pantry,” or even “Western treasury.” Do you think the locals call it Tibet? Nothing of the kind, they would rather use another word - Bod. Then where did it all come from? And, for example, from the traveler Guillaume de Rubruk (XIII century).
The word he gives is "Tibet" almost of Sogdian origin, but in the end it became... Yes, yes, English. And let’s not forget that the British at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries had such thoughts - how to take Tibet into their hands after India, but it didn’t work out (in including Russia interfered). It remained Chinese, as it had been for centuries before, except for short periods of relative autonomy.
You may think that our conversation is about the fact that more and more often, all over the world, countries and peoples are correcting such mistakes of the colonialists. Calcutta became Kolkata, Madras became Chennai, Burma became Myanmar. Not to mention the fact that Delhiis gradually accustoming the world to the fact that the country has long been called Bharat, and India is the same thing, but more like a favorite geographical name of the British, rather than a “power”.
All this is sad, because colonialism gave rise to a variety of romances of robbery and murder, as well as delights in the conquered exotic. In addition, relearning is long and tedious for us. But if we are seriously talking about the decline of the colonial era, which lasted five centuries, then a lot of things will change here, except for British names, and a lot of things will have to be slowly relearned.
So, is this what the Tibet story is about? Not really. In China they just started calling it Xizang in their English-language publications, but in Chinese it already sounded like that. And note that it is not in the Chinese style to force foreigners to change something in their language and other habits. So, a gentle hint at how the world is changing.
But the real story is not philological, it is completely different, it is something about an elephant that no one noticed. Let's say it again: what kind of document became the reason for the “renaming scandal”? Andhere it is, entirely and in English, is called “The Policy of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet in a New Era: Approaches and Achievements.” Here is a report on the reign ofXi Jinping (since 2012) plus some ideas for the future.
This is an event, because there is a sea of facts and other statistics. For example: over the specified period, the Tibetan economy grew 2.28 times, an average of 8.6 percent per year. That is, the mountainous region, difficult to live in, was among the record holders even against the backdrop of other Chinese miracles.
There is also such a figure - 30 million tourists a year. This is for those who think that repression, suppression of local culture and other horrors are happening in Tibet: if the region is open to such an extent, then there will not be much atrocity there. Conferences, exhibitions, the opening of more and more border crossings, for example withNepal. As for culture, we note the revival of the unique Tibetan opera, the restoration of monasteries, the protection of ancient relics, and the creation almost from scratch of the University of Tibetan Medicine, with the introduction into scientific circulation of up to 600 ancient books on it.
In fact, there is another topic here, it concerns not the departure from colonial names, but what development and culture are. Tibet has always been a legend because even in the middle of the last century it was a mountainous territory frozen in the deep Middle Ages - with ancient secrets, but also with wild poverty. And the mystical glory of Tibet lay precisely in this.
But if a region becomes rich, open to the world, if its culture is dug up from burial grounds and studied in universities, does this mean that the old Tibet has been destroyed? There are many such places on the planet. I remember a discussion about the lifestyle of the Orang Asli tribes inMalaysia: they are happy to wear jeans and take modern medicine - is this good or bad? This is clearly one of the most difficult questions for humanity.
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