What do a former table tennis world champion, two Chinese national soccer team players, a celebrity musician, and the first woman scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have in common with 99,995 other Chinese? They are all called Wang Tao, a name that according to a recent CAS report is shared by 100,000 people.

Already fighting a variety of resource shortages from oil to water, China is now gearing up to redress a scarcity of a different kind: that of surnames. The world’s most populous country is blessed with abundant human resources. Yet 85 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion people share just 100 family names so that there are over 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis. To put these numbers in perspective, were all the Wangs in China to form an independent nation they would become the world’s 12th most populous country.

 

The resultant confusion over similar names has become such a problem that Beijing is currently mulling over a draft proposal put forward by the police that would legally allow parents to combine their surnames while naming their babies. According to China’s Public Security Bureau, the move would help create 1.28 million potential new surnames thus redressing to some extent the current deficit of appellations.

 

If the draft is approved, it would, for example, officially allow a father surnamed Zhang and a mother surnamed Liu to give their baby either Zhangliu or Liuzhang as a family name. Currently, surnames are passed down exclusively through the male line.

 

Surnames in China have roots that are deeply entwined with the nation’s cultural heritage, so much so that the word for the “common man” in Chinese is “laobaixing” which literally translates as the “old 100 names” and refers to the 100 names that comprise the overwhelming majority of Han Chinese family names.

 

Until a few decades ago, school children across China were taught to reel off the list of 100 surnames by rote. “Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li, Zhou, Wu, Zheng, Wang” the list begins, which when said aloud has a nursery-rhyme like lilt.

 

Du Peng of the People’s University’s Population and Development Research Centre explains that the ranking of the 100 names list can be traced back to the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), which was founded by the Emperor Zhao Kuangyin. Hence the list leads with the name Zhao, despite Wangs, Lis, Chens, and several others being larger in terms of actual numbers.

 

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