A screen capture from video shows trekkers leaving their campsite, as unusually heavy snow and rainfall pummeled the Himalayas, in the Tibet Region, China, October 5, 2025. / Geshuang Chen/Handout via REUTERS

As the world observes World Tibet Day on 6 July, attention once again turns to the struggle of one of Asia's oldest civilizations to preserve its identity under Chinese rule. While discussions often focus on human rights, religion or geopolitics, an equally profound battle is being fought over language, history and memory.

Beijing's effort to redefine Tibet as "Xizang" is not merely a change in official terminology; it is part of a broader project to reshape how Tibet's past, present and future are understood.

People are not erased only when their land is taken, they are erased when their name is replaced, their language is pushed to the margins, their history is rewritten and their children are taught to remember themselves through someone else’s vocabulary. Tibet’s story is not merely the story of a high plateau under Chinese rule.

It is the story of Bod, the name Tibetans used for their own homeland becoming 吐蕃 / Tubo in Tang Chinese records, then 西藏 / Xizang in later Chinese state language, and now a target of a new legal architecture that speaks the language of “ethnic unity” while tightening the grip of assimilation.

The first fact to recover is simple: Tibet did not begin as “Xizang.” In Tibetan, the homeland is Bod. A Tibetan person is Bod-pa or Böpa. Modern scholars identify Bod as the Tibetan toponym for Tibet, and Chinese cultural sources themselves acknowledge that “Tubo” was a Chinese transliteration linked to Bod-pa, the name Tibetans called themselves during the Tang dynasty.

The Chinese term 吐蕃, now commonly romanized as Tubo, was not originally a Communist Party invention. It was the Tang-era Chinese way of naming a powerful Tibetan empire that stood across the Himalayas and Central Asia. The pronunciation is varied, many older English works render it as Tufan - but the political point is clear: Tang China was not naming an obscure border tribe. It was naming a major Asian power.

Under the Yarlung dynasty, Tibet became one of the great empires of early medieval Asia. Its rulers, known as tsenpo, built a state that dealt with Tang China, Central Asian kingdoms, Turkic powers and Buddhist India. In 763, Tibetan forces even entered the Tang capital Chang’an during a period of Tang weakness. Later treaties reflected the fact that Tibet was not a passive frontier but a serious diplomatic and military actor.

The clearest symbol of this status is the 821/ 823 Sino-Tibetan treaty, preserved on the famous treaty pillar at Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple. Scholarly work on the inscription records that it concerned an agreement between the Tibetan king and the Tang emperor. A University of California Press sample chapter notes that the treaty treated Tibetans and Chinese as equals and recorded the idea that native Tibetans should be happy in Tibet and Chinese in China.

This matters today because Beijing’s preferred historical narrative often tries to flatten Tibet’s past into a story of uninterrupted Chinese sovereignty. But the old record is more complex. Tibet had its own name, court, rulers, diplomacy, religious policy, military power and written culture. It was not born as a province. It was not born as “Xizang.” It was Bod.

Tibetan civilization also created one of Asia’s great religious-literary cultures. From the imperial period onward, Tibet became a major center of Buddhist translation. Indian, Chinese and Tibetan masters debated doctrine; Sanskrit Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan; monasteries and temples became institutions of learning, governance and memory. The Tibetan literary tradition preserved vast bodies of Buddhist knowledge that later became central not only to Tibet, but also to Mongolia, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and the wider Himalayan world.

Language was at the heart of that civilization. Tibetan was not just a household tongue. It was a vehicle of philosophy, law, poetry, history and diplomacy. The Tibetan script, traditionally associated with the seventh-century figure Thonmi Sambhota, became the vessel through which a highland civilization recorded its sacred texts and political memory.

Even where details of the script’s origin are debated, the larger point is not: Tibet developed a written culture with deep Indian, Buddhist and indigenous roots, distinct from Chinese script and Chinese historical consciousness. The land itself shaped this identity. The Tibetan Plateau is not a minor geographical feature.

The U.S. Geological Survey describes it as the “roof of the world,” the world’s highest and largest plateau, averaging more than 4,500 meters in elevation. This environment produced a civilization of pastoral routes, monastic centers, highland agriculture, sacred mountains, pilgrimage circuits, oral epics and political networks adapted to one of the harshest inhabited landscapes on earth.

The later term 西藏 / Xizang belongs to a different political history. Chinese-language sources and historical discussions show that “Xizang” became prominent in the Qing period, after earlier terms such as 吐蕃/ Tubo, 乌思藏/Wusizang, 图白忒/Tubaite and 唐古忒/Tanggute. Academia Sinica notes that the name “Xizang” mainly began in the second half of the seventeenth century under the Qing, and that early Qing understandings of Tibet were still uncertain and evolving.

This does not mean every use of Xizang is automatically false. In Chinese administrative language, Xizang came to refer especially to the territory now called the Tibet Autonomous Region. But that is precisely the problem: Xizang narrows Tibet. Tibet, as understood by Tibetans, includes the wider Tibetan cultural world—Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo—spread across today’s Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. By insisting on “Xizang,” Beijing shifts the discussion from a people and civilization to an administrative unit.

That shift has become more aggressive in recent years. China’s own 2023 State Council white paper used “Xizang” in English and framed governance around Communist Party leadership, national unification, ethnic unity, integration, and the adaptation of religion to China’s realities. The Journal of Democracy has described Beijing’s push to replace “Tibet” with “Xizang” as part of a wider effort to alter global understanding of Tibet’s identity and history.

This is where language becomes politics. “Tibet” carries memory: monasteries, exile, the Dalai Lama, the plateau, the 1959 uprising, human rights, cultural survival. “Bod” carries even deeper memory: the Tibetan self-name, the inner name of the homeland. “Xizang,” especially when exported into English and diplomacy, carries the state’s frame: Tibet as a governed region, a border-security question, a development project, a minority file inside the Chinese nation.

The new Ethnic Unity and Progress Law, effective from 1 July 2026, must be read in this context. On paper, Beijing presents it as a law to promote harmony among China’s ethnic groups. In practice, the text gives legal force to the idea of “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation."

It requires schools and educational institutions to run this political idea through education, teaching materials and social practice. It makes the national common language, Mandarin Chinese-the basic language for schooling and official work, while minority languages are formally “protected” but subordinated in public order and visibility.

The law also enters the home. It tells parents and guardians to educate minors to love the Communist Party, the motherland, the people and the Chinese nation, and not to instill ideas considered harmful to ethnic unity. It regulates media, online platforms and cultural display. It even claims legal responsibility over organizations and individuals outside China who are accused of undermining ethnic unity or creating ethnic division.

For Tibetans, this is not abstract. It comes after years of pressure on language, education and religion. Human Rights Watch reported in 2026 that post-2021 education policies in Tibetan areas are reshaping the linguistic, cultural and social foundations of Tibetan society and putting Tibetan language and culture at risk within a generation. The report urged China to stop forced assimilation and ensure Tibetan children can learn and use Tibetan in school.

United Nations experts had already raised alarm in 2023 that around one million Tibetan children were affected by policies separating them from families and placing them in state-run residential schools, warning of cultural and linguistic assimilation. Freedom House has also documented extensive controls over Tibetan Buddhism, including intrusive official presence in monasteries, surveillance, reeducation campaigns, restrictions on devotion to the Dalai Lama, and limits on travel and communication.

This is why the debate over Bod, Tubo and Xizang is not a linguistic side issue. It is the front line of cultural survival. A state that controls the name controls the frame. A state that controls the language of schooling controls the next generation’s memory. A state that controls religion controls the inner life of a people. And a state that calls all this “unity” makes resistance sound like division.

Tibet’s past was not silent. It had a name before Xizang. It had a written language before modern Chinese nation-building. It had treaties before Communist rule. It had kings, monasteries, scholars, translators, armies, diplomats and poets. It had a civilizational reach across the Himalayas that cannot be reduced to an administrative label. The tragedy is not only that China governs Tibet.

The deeper tragedy is that China now seeks to define what Tibet is allowed to mean. “Xizang” is not just a word when it is used to replace Tibet in international discourse. “Ethnic unity” is not just unity when it makes Mandarin dominant, political education compulsory, religion subordinate and Tibetan memory suspect.

The world needs to be careful with names. Tibet is not a colonial inconvenience to be corrected by Beijing. Bod is not a relic to be buried in museums. Tubo is not proof that Tibet was always a Chinese province; it is historical evidence that even Chinese sources once recognized a distinct Tibetan power. And Xizang, whatever its administrative use inside China, should not be allowed to erase the older and wider identity of a people who have called themselves Bod-pa for centuries. To defend Tibet’s name is to defend a people’s right to remember themselves.

The writer is an author and a columnist. He has authored more than 15 books including 'Taliban: War and Religion in Afghanistan'.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad.)

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