Too many Wangs as China runs out of names
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
12/06/2007
The Telegraph
The world's most populous nation is running out of names, according to a Chinese government report.
In the world's largest nation, there are 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis!
According to popular folklore, Chinese people should take their surnames from a list of 100 names.
But as the country's population continues to soar, the excess of Wangs, Lis and Zhangs is leading to confusion.
There are now 93,000 people called Wang Tao alone, the China Daily newspaper said in reporting the review by the Ministry of Public Security, the police service, which handles identity registration.
The list of 100 surnames is not binding, and 15 per cent of the population have other less common ones.
Nevertheless the official list is rote-learned by schoolchildren, and gives rise to the Chinese term for the common man - "laobaixing", or "old hundred names".
According to the most recent survey, Wang just beat out Li at the top of the list. More than 14 per cent of the population has one of the two names.
That figure does not sound so huge, but with a total population of 1.3 billion and rising, it works out to 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis.
The government is now considering lifting restrictions on what counts as a surname to allow a greater variety of characters, including from ethnic minority languages.
Currently, these have to be dropped in favour of the closest sounding Chinese surname.
But more dramatic is the possibility of allowing babies to be registered with both parents' surnames, creating a first generation of double-barrelled children. This is already fashionable in Hong Kong.
telegraph.co.uk
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
12/06/2007
The Telegraph
The world's most populous nation is running out of names, according to a Chinese government report.
In the world's largest nation, there are 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis!
According to popular folklore, Chinese people should take their surnames from a list of 100 names.
But as the country's population continues to soar, the excess of Wangs, Lis and Zhangs is leading to confusion.
There are now 93,000 people called Wang Tao alone, the China Daily newspaper said in reporting the review by the Ministry of Public Security, the police service, which handles identity registration.
The list of 100 surnames is not binding, and 15 per cent of the population have other less common ones.
Nevertheless the official list is rote-learned by schoolchildren, and gives rise to the Chinese term for the common man - "laobaixing", or "old hundred names".
According to the most recent survey, Wang just beat out Li at the top of the list. More than 14 per cent of the population has one of the two names.
That figure does not sound so huge, but with a total population of 1.3 billion and rising, it works out to 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis.
The government is now considering lifting restrictions on what counts as a surname to allow a greater variety of characters, including from ethnic minority languages.
Currently, these have to be dropped in favour of the closest sounding Chinese surname.
But more dramatic is the possibility of allowing babies to be registered with both parents' surnames, creating a first generation of double-barrelled children. This is already fashionable in Hong Kong.
telegraph.co.uk