Millions of Chinese forced to change their names

[Time to drop the out-dated pictograms and get with Latin script?}

“Ma,” a Chinese character for horse, is the 13th most common family
name in China, shared by nearly 17 million people. That can cause no
end of confusion when Mas get together, especially if those Mas also
share the same given name, as many Chinese do.
Ma Cheng’s book-loving grandfather came up with an elegant solution to
this common problem. Twenty-six years ago, when his granddaughter was
born, he combed through his library of Chinese dictionaries and
lighted upon a character pronounced “cheng.” Cheng, which means
galloping steeds, looks just like the character for horse, except that
it is condensed and written three times in a row.
The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they
tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes
it so much.
That is also why the government wants her to change it.
For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give
their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the
Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernise its vast
database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public
Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that
every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with
colour photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to
forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a
priority.
The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of
the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government
report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million
other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new
cards — unless they change their names to something more common.
Moreover, the situation is about to get worse or, in the government’s
view, better. Since at least 2003, China has been working on a
standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life,
including when naming children.
One newspaper reported last week that the list would be issued later
this year and would curb the use of obscure names. A government
linguistics official told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that the
list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far
fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it
was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500
characters are in everyday use.
Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with
too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or
even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But
many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of
classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help
their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.
By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens.
Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the
masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.
The number of Chinese family names in use has tended to shrink as
China’s population has grown, a winnowing of surnames that has
occurred in many cultures over time.
At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million,
followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. To refer to an
unidentified person — the equivalent of “just anybody” in English —
one Chinese saying can be loosely translated this way: “some Zhang,
some Li.”
The potential for mix-ups is vast. There are nearly enough Chinese
named Zhang Wei to populate the city of Pittsburgh. Nicknames are
liberally bestowed in classrooms and workplaces to tell people apart.
Confronting three students named Liu Fang, for example, one middle-
school teacher nicknamed them Big, Little and Middle.
Wang Daliang, a linguistics scholar with the China Youth University
for Political Science, said picking rare characters for given names
only compounded the problem and inconvenienced everyone. “Using
obscure names to avoid duplication of names or to be unique is not
good,” he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.
“Now a lot of people are perplexed by their names,” he said. “The
computer cannot even recognize them and people cannot read them. This
has become an obstacle in communication.”
But Professor Zhou Youyong, dean of Southeast University’s law school,
said the government should tread carefully in issuing any new
regulation. “The right to name children is a basic right of citizens,”
he said.
Miss Ma said that while her given name was unusual, bank employees,
passport control clerks and ticket agents had always managed to deal
with it, usually by writing it by hand. But when she tried to renew
her identity card last August, she said, Beijing public security
officials turned her down flat.
“Your name is so troublesome and problematic,” she recalled an
official telling her. “Just change it.”
Miss Ma argues that the government’s technology should adapt, not
her.
“There were no such regulations when I was born, so I should be
entitled to keep my name for my whole life,” she said. If she changes
her name to get an identity card, she noted, it will be wrong on all
of her other documents, like her passport and university diploma.
Besides, she said, “I can’t think of another, better name.”
Using the time-honoured Chinese method of backdoor connections, Miss
Ma was able to get a temporary card in January. She must renew it
every three months but considers that a small sacrifice for keeping
her name.
Zhao C., a 23-year-old college student, gave up the fight for his. His
father, a lawyer, chose the letter C from the English alphabet, saying
it was simple, memorable and stood for China.
When he could not get a new identity card in 2006, Zhao C. sued. But
security officials convinced him that it would cost millions of
dollars to alter the database, his father said, so he dropped the suit
in February.
His case might suggest that resistance against China’s powerful
bureaucracy was futile. Still, the government’s plan to limit the use
of characters has not gone all that smoothly.
The new rules were originally supposed to be issued by 2005. Now, 70
revisions later, they have yet to be put in place.
An official this week batted away questions, saying publicity might
delay the rules even longer.
.

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