/Pogled.info/ It all started with a material that skipped over many of our media: after the State Council (government) of China published the White Paper on Tibet last month, Beijing stopped calling it Tibet and used the word “Sizzan” instead. The calculations began: before the book was published, Tibet was mentioned 700 times in the official media, and then everything became “Sizzan”.
A similar incident (ie confusion) occurred in Russia in 1997 when Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony and was returned to China. In Russian writing circles, the not-so-literate grammar nazis began to run amok, claiming that the authorities in Beijing had authoritarian renamed Hong Kong to Xiangnan, and now everyone should only write “Syangan” in Russian. Although no one actually renames anything, it’s just that the two characters for “fragrant bay” are read and spoken in northern, state Chinese as Xiangang, and in the southern dialect sound like Hong Kong.
But no one has renamed Tibet either. In Chinese for a very long time it has been exactly “Sizzan”, that is, “Western storehouse or even “Western treasury”. Do you think the locals call it Tibet? Nothing like that, they prefer to use another word – “Bod”. So where does all this come from? For example, by the traveler Guillaume de Rubruck (XIII century). The word “Tibet” he gives is of Sogdian origin, but in the end it becomes… yes, yes, English. And let’s not forget that the British in the 19th and 20th centuries had such thoughts – how to lay hands on Tibet after India, but it didn’t work out (including Russia prevented them). It remains Chinese as it was centuries ago, except for brief periods of relative autonomy.
You might think that our conversation is about the fact that more and more countries and peoples around the world are correcting such wrongs of the colonizers. Calcutta became Kolkata, Madras became Chennai, Burma became Myanmar. Not to mention that in Delhi they are gradually getting the world used to the fact that the country has long been called Bharat, and India is the same, but rather as a geographical name, beloved by the British, and not as a “country”. All this is sad because colonialism gave rise to various cases of robbery and murder, as well as enjoyment of the conquered exoticism. Also, retraining is long and tedious for us. But – if we are serious about the decline of the colonial era that lasted five centuries, then many things will change besides British names, and many things will have to be slowly relearned.
So, is this what the Tibet story is about? Not exactly. In China, they started calling it “Sizzan” in their English publications, but it already sounded like that in Chinese. And note that it is not Chinese style to force foreigners to change their language and other habits. So, a little hint of how the world is changing.
But the real story is not philological, it is quite different, it is something about an elephant that no one noticed. Let’s repeat: what document became the cause of the “renaming scandal”? And there it is, all in English dubbed “The Chinese Communist Party’s Policy in Tibet in a New Era: Approaches and Achievements”. Here’s a report on Xi Jinping’s rule (as of 2012) plus some ideas for the future.
It is an event because there is a sea of facts and other statistics. For example: during 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, is among the record holders even against the background of other Chinese wonders.
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 so open, then there won’t be many abuses there. Conferences, exhibitions, opening more and more border crossings, for example with Nepal. 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 a university of Tibetan medicine, with the introduction of up to 600 ancient books into its scientific circulation.
In fact, there is another topic here, it is not about the departure from colonial names, but what is development and culture. 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 lies precisely in this.
But if the region becomes rich, open to the world, if its culture is exhumed from cemeteries and studied in universities, does this mean that the old Tibet is destroyed? There are many such places on the planet. I remember a discussion about the lifestyle of the Orang Asli tribes in Malaysia: they happily wear jeans and take modern medicine – is this good or bad? This is clearly one of the most difficult questions for humanity.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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2023-12-16 04:47:43
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