Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says。名字不在字库里？改名吧。中国说。
NYTIMES
BEIJING — “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.
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Ma Cheng must renew a temporary card every three months in order to keep her unique name.
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Times Topics: China
The New York Times
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 modernize 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 color 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-honored 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, sohe 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.
名字不在字库里？改名吧。中国说！
北京－以“马”为姓的人数，在中国的大姓中列第13位，总人数约达1700万。如果所有姓马的人在一起就会造成无休无止的混乱，尤其是他们共有一个名时。
马（马马马）手不释卷的祖父想到了用一个古雅的方法解决这个普遍存在的问题。26年前孙女出生的时候，他查遍了汉语辞典，看到这个（马马马）字的时候他眼前一亮，（马马马）的意思是驰骋，外形上咋一看像马这个字，只不过把马缩小并排写三次。
马小姐说，这个太生僻了，谁看到这个字都会同时记住她的名字和她本人。这也是她喜欢这个名字的一个原因。
因此政府希望她改名。
对马（马马马）和其他数百万中国人来说，他们父母给予子女独一无二的个性的希望与中国官僚机构希望维护秩序的要求迎头相撞。为对13亿公民的数据库进行现代化改造，政府的公安局把手写的身份证换成人人必须持有的、电脑可读取的卡片，并在上面贴上个人彩照，还嵌入微芯片。新一代身份证更难以伪造，还可以在类似于机场这样的重要安全场所被扫描。
然而，据一份2006年的政府报告，公安局的电脑程序只能识别大约5万5千个汉字里面的32252个。其结果是以生僻字作为名字的6千万中国人当中，包括马小姐在内的一些人领不到新的身份证，除非他们把名字换成更通用的字。
而且，形势正变的更加严峻，但如果从政府的角度来看，形势更为乐观。至少从2003年开始，中国就已经着手制订规范化的汉字表，供人们日常使用，包括给小孩起名。
有报纸报道说这张表将于今年年底公布，并禁用生僻字作为名字。一位政府语言事务官员告诉新华社——中国的官方通讯社——说这张正字表将包括至少8000个汉字。即使这一数目已经远远少于数据库可能包含的总数，该官员表示这些汉字已经足以“在任何场合表达任何含义”。目前日常使用的汉字是3500个左右。
政府官员提出，名字用字已经失控，因为许多家长选择用最拗口的汉字给孩子起名，有的甚至自己造字，有点像语言时尚配件店（请达人翻译）。但是不少中国夫妇为独特而赏心悦目的名字出自汗牛充栋的古代典籍而自豪，这在某种程度上有助于孩子在姓氏集中的社会里出人头地。
有人估算过，中国的前100个大姓占了公民人口的85%。“老百姓”是人民大众的通俗叫法。与此相对比的是，90%的美国人有着7万个姓氏。
姓氏的数量逐渐减少伴随中国人口的增长。随着时间的推移，许多社会都存在着脱离姓氏的情况。
最近一次统计表明，姓王的人超过9200万，是中国第一大姓，其次是姓李和姓张，分别达到9100万和8600万。要泛指一个人，和英语的“有那么一个人”用法相似，中国的习惯说法是“张三李四”。
人和人弄混的机率很大。中国叫“Zhang Wei”的人足以匹敌匹茨堡市的总人口。在学校和工作场合，人们用昵称来区别同名同姓的人。有一个中学老师用“大，中，小”来称呼班上三个名字都叫“刘芳”的学生。
中国青年政治学院的语言学家王大梁认为，用生僻字起名只会使问题更加突出，并且给大家带来不便。在一封电子邮件里面他回答提问时说：“使用生僻的名字以避免重复或者突显个性并不好。”
他说：“现在很多人遇到这些名字非常困惑。电脑无法识别，人们不认得这些字，造成了交流障碍。”
但是东南大学法学院的周游泳教授认为政府应在出台新政策时权衡利弊。他说：“起名权是公民的基本权利。”
马小姐说她的名字比较罕见，银行、护照管理和售票处的工作人员都会认真对待，通常是手写。而当她打算更换新一代身份证的时候，北京公安局的态度令她心灰意冷。
她回忆当时一位民警跟她说：“你的名字烦不胜烦，改了吧。”
马小姐回应道，政府的技术应该兼容她的名字，而不是她去迎合政府。
她说：“我出生的时候没有这些条条框框，所以我理应终生保有我的名字。”如果她为了换身份证而改名，那么她的所有文件都将失效，比如她的护照和本科学位证。
而且她说：“我再也想不出比这更好的名字。”
通过走后门，她一月份领到一张临时身份证。她必须每三个月更换一次，但是考虑到作为保留名字的代价，这还是值得的。
赵C，一个23岁的大学生，放弃了保留名字的权利。他的父亲是一位律师，从英语字母表里面选了C作为儿子的名字，觉得简单好记，C还代表CHINA（中国）。
2006年，赵C在无法领取新一代身份证的情况下提起诉讼。但是他爸爸说，公安人员以需要花几百万美元更新系统来说服他，使他今年2月撤诉。
他的案子或许揭示了对抗中国的官僚机构是多么徒劳。然而，政府限制汉字使用的政策进行的并不那么顺利。
新规则原定于2005年出台。现在，经过70多次修改之后，颁布时间仍遥遥无期。
一位官员本周回避了这些问题，说公开草案将使条例的颁布时间拖的更久。
