China Cracking Down on Unique Names

In a land of over a billion people and relatively few surnames, a unique first name can come in handy. But China is making it hard for people with unique names to keep their names, and will soon make it even harder for parents to choose unique names for their children.

First, the country is replacing its citizens’ handwritten identity cards with computer-readable cards. The computers being used for this transition, however, are only programmed to read 32,252 of the 55,000 or so characters in the Chinese writing system. The result? About 60 million Chinese “with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.”

Second, the government is planning to issue “a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children.” How many characters will the list include? Fewer than 9,000. (My source article was written in April 2009, so I don’t know if the list has been officially issued yet. I can’t find any news about it, so I’m assuming it has not.)

What surprises me about all this is not that the Chinese government is imposing name restrictions, but that it took them this long to do it. I also think it’s interesting that the change is being driven as much by technology as it is by ideology.