Digitization forces China’s 1.2 bn people adopt only 100 surnames!

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” William Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet five centuries ago.

But even The Bard of Avon’s head would probably roll in 2021 if he found that China’s 1.37 billion people share only 6,000 surnames. Of them, 1.2 billion shares only about 100 surnames.

And, of them, 433 million, or 30 percent population, have only five most common surnames: Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu, and Chen.

Only about 6,000 surnames are being used by 1.37 billion Chinese citizens, the Ministry of Public Security said. And the vast majority of them, 86%, share just 100 of those surnames.

In contrast, the United States, whose population is less than a quarter of China’s, has 6.3 million surnames, according to the 2010 census. A majority of those names were only reported once.

Some reasons are being cited for this strange famine of surnames in China. Racially, it is less diverse than the US, where minority groups increase surname diversity. Also, it is difficult to create a new surname by adding a random stroke to a Chinese character, unlike the way one can by adding a letter to an English name.

But the most important reason seems to be the impact of digital technology, which has transformed daily life in China, which now largely relies on a limited list of standardized Chinese characters to gel with the official standardized database.

People with rare characters in their names find it incompatible with existing computer systems with standardized fonts and characters, forcing many of them to change their names for the sake of convenience, even if it means abandoning centuries of heritage and language.

China has historically recorded more than 20,000 surnames, Chen Jiawei, an Associate Professor at Beijing Normal University, said.

Factors like migration, political turmoil, and warfare left the people’s names in flux, and many of them since vanished. Across the dynasties, ethnic minorities and nomadic groups also adopted Han Chinese names.

People sometimes simplified complex characters by adopting similar-sounding ones with fewer strokes for digital convenience, changed a name due to superstition, or adopted a new one in search of good fortune.

Experts say surnames are lost or die out in patrilineal societies with each new generation as women adopt their husbands’ surnames. Also, large families with more resources could have more children, thus expanding and spreading the family surname, at the expense of other surnames.

Rare or uncommon surnames have been dying out for centuries — but they face an accelerated crisis in modern China, CNN reported.

With digitization, hand-written documents, which had rare characters in people’s names, began to vanish. The rising use of digital technology made it near-impossible to use these names in the written form. Not all Chinese characters have yet been coded into computer systems. By 2017, only about 32,000 characters were coded in the Chinese character database, leaving out tens of thousands of characters, state-run Xinhua news agency said.

With exponential, all-pervading digitization, everything moved online. Those having a rare character in their names or surnames found it difficult to cope with the databases. Nearly 60 million Chinese citizens faced this predicament in 2017 and were forced to change their names or surnames to comply with the official digital system.

Also, the government’s efforts to standardize and regulate the language has led to the increasing commonness of Chinese names. Different dialects of Mandarin used in various provinces, unintelligible to many, and the Beijing-based Standard Mandarin, as the lingua franca and the national spoken and written language since 2000, have compounded the problem of common surnames.

The government published the General Standard Chinese Character Table in 2013 as a new “starting point” for standardized Chinese. It consists of more than 8,000 characters, which is just a fraction of the total number of Chinese characters in existence. It only provided a smaller pool of characters that people were encouraged to choose from for their names.

Experts have since increased the database from 32,000 characters to 70,000 characters and are targeting it to have more than 90,000 characters.

But it’s not just a matter of inconvenience. Chinese surnames are central to people’s identities; they hold origin stories, reveal historic patterns of migration, and represent a direct tie to a person’s ancestry and heritage. To give up a surname is to sever a part of family history that can stretch back for centuries.

“We don’t want to lose the surnames our ancestors gave us in our lifetime,” one villager said. “Our generation still knows what our original surnames were, but our children have their names changed from an early age, and in a few years they will forget their (original) surnames.”