Then & Now | Will Hong Kong be renamed Xianggang, its Mandarin name, in due course? Similar has happened before
- Attempts in China to bury the past to fit the current political narrative saw the name ‘Manchuria’ officially retired
- Only time will tell if ‘Hong Kong’ shape-shifts into ‘Xianggang, Asia’s World City’, with the old name relegated to ‘deprecated exonym’ status
“What’s in a name?” Quite a lot, in the modern world – especially when these labels concern places and their populations, who currently rules them, who had political power in the past and what groups may harbour aspirations to re-exert that earlier authority at some future point.
Elimination, or, at the least, deliberate minimisation, of earlier toponyms forms part of the current political campaign against “historical nihilism” – one of “the seven unmentionables” officially mandated against in 2013 by the Chinese Communist Party as a drive against (allegedly Western) liberal values.
Thus, no version of the past can be permitted to compete with, contradict, challenge or potentially supplant officially mandated chronicles.
The long-term danger is obvious: if an alternative version is inherently compelling or – even worse – more closely aligns with provable historical facts, then the party’s grip on power may be weakened.
Any formerly widespread toponym that has fallen into official disapproval is known as a “deprecated exonym” – this lapidary term signifies the preferred mainland Chinese rebuttal for previously commonplace terms such as Manchuria, now replaced by Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.