To win the global war of words over Tibet, China’s western autonomous region that repeatedly makes international headlines, Beijing must stop fighting the West’s algorithms and start adapting to them.
That was the blunt assessment of Zachary Lundquist, an American media professional with the state-run China International Communications Group (CICG), speaking in Lhasa, capital of China’s Tibetan autonomous region, on Tuesday.
Lundquist – better known by his Chinese name, Huang Hao – was addressing an audience of more than 300 media professionals, government officials and academics at the Second Xizang International Communication Conference.
He argued that the biggest barrier to projecting an accurate image of modern Tibet was no longer political hostility from Western governments but the invisible, self-reinforcing recommendation engines of Silicon Valley.
Despite Beijing using the region’s official romanised pinyin name “Xizang” since 2023 to assert its sovereign narrative, when Western users search “Tibet” on social media, the algorithm often steers them towards a “pre-existing, highly politicised narrative”.
“It is not always born out of pure malice, but the algorithm ‘learns’ these associations over time,” Lundquist said, adding that this created an unbreakable information cocoon where rational voices were drowned out.
