Unusual Names in China Are Unlike Li

BEIJING — Li Hui’s identity crisis hit rock bottom when he started working at the Grand Hotel here a few years ago. He quickly discovered he wasn’t the only Li Hui around.

In fact, he wasn’t even the only Li Hui at the front desk. There were two, including him, while a third worked in financial.

When another pair of Li Huis showed up for training months later, the count rose to five. Phone messages were a headache; office raffles were hell (“And the winner is: Li Hui!”).

Eventually, Li escaped the hotel business--but not his identity crunch. Now he listens to radio personality Li Hui read the morning headlines. Two of his buddies have other pals called Li Hui. By his own reckoning, Li, 28, has personally met six people in Beijing alone who have his name. He knows of scads more.

“Maybe I’ll form a Li Hui club,” he mused one afternoon at the fashionable restaurant he manages. “That’d be fun.”

In the latest of China’s looming shortages, from jobs to electricity to marriageable women, chalk up another commodity: names.

The country claims one-fifth of humanity but just a fraction of its surnames. Of the 12,000 surnames that existed in China centuries ago, only 3,100 remain today--a tiny number for 1.2 billion people, experts say.

Indeed, the nation’s top five family names cover nearly a third of the population, or 350 million citizens--the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the U.S. and Mexico, combined, sharing just five last names.

Couple the shrinking surname supply with a serious lack of invention by many parents in producing given names for their children and you wind up with thousands of Chinese like Li Hui who bear the same moniker--along with numerous instances of mistaken identity.

Lab tests get mixed up, as in the case of the man who told relatives he had inoperable cancer when the unlucky patient turned out to be someone else. Love letters get opened by the wrong blushing recipients. Suspects get arrested for crimes they did not commit, including one man in Shandong province whose name not only matched the villain’s but also the local security chief’s.

Complete Meltdown

The confusion is enough to cause some of China’s scholars to warn of serious problems ahead, if not a complete bureaucratic meltdown, if more variety is not introduced.

“All of society should pay attention to the issue of identical names,” says Yuan Yida, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who studies the name drought. “We should avoid giving duplicate names. That is everyone’s duty.”

But it is easier said than done in a culture where names contain enormous significance--even, many believe, the seeds of a person’s destiny. Parents are reluctant to deviate from the tried and true, afraid of forever jinxing their offspring.

Political and social upheavals that precipitated the decline in the number of original names, from imperial conquests to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, have proved hard to counteract. And as with so many things in China, change is difficult because the sheer size of the country renders the task a staggering one.

Based on a 1982 census, 87 million people in China have the family name Li, making it the most common surname on the planet. (Imagine everyone in Germany bearing the same last name.)

The Lis of China, who trace their family name to the Tang dynasty rulers of the 7th century, far outstrip the mere 2.4 million Americans who go by Smith, the most widespread surname in the English-speaking world. Ditto the Wangs (80 million), Zhangs (78 million), Lius (60 million) and Chens (50 million).

Astonishingly, just 100 surnames now account for nearly 90% of the Chinese population.

By contrast, another Asian nation, Japan, boasts more than 70,000 surnames for its 125 million citizens. South Korea, like China, has problems with surnames--three family names are held by 45% of South Koreans--but even the most popular, Kim, covers only about 9 million people.

The concentration of Chinese family names stretches back hundreds of years. When a Mongolian official asked Genghis Khan how he planned to conquer northern China in the 13th century, legend has it that he replied: “I will kill everybody called Wang, Li, Zhang and Liu. The rest will be no problem.”

The development of surnames in China provides a fascinating window on the history of the country as a whole since ancient times.

“We can trace changes in Chinese history and culture in the evolution of Chinese surnames,” Yuan says.

China recorded its first surnames 4,000 years ago in the Xia dynasty--among the oldest surnames in history. The first surnames were important matriarchal designations passed down through the female line to distinguish ruling clans from one another.

Patriarchal names developed later, but soon overtook their female counterparts. Eventually, dozens of ethnic groups in China added their names to the pot of ethnic Chinese, or “Han” Chinese surnames, giving rise to almost 12,000 options, a majority of which consisted of two or more characters, unlike traditional Han surnames of a single character.

But as the Han Chinese grew more dominant, their surnames also prevailed, swallowing up less common names through intermarriage and assimilation.

Rulers conferred Han appellations on minority groups as a symbol of either conquest or honor. Other ethnic minorities voluntarily changed their names, seeking protection or identification with Han culture, the most advanced in the world at points throughout history.

“That clearly has been a big advantage if you’ve had a Han surname during times when it’s been expedient politically,” says Joanna Mountain, a researcher at UC Berkeley who has studied the frequency of Chinese surnames.

So many nationalities began adopting Han surnames that Emperor Shizong in the 12th century repeatedly issued edicts prohibiting more switches. During China’s last dynasty, the Qing, the country’s Manchu rulers also admonished ethnic Manchus to quit taking on Han surnames and to preserve their own heritage.

Ultimately, however, Han family names triumphed, reducing the pool of available names to 3,100--a number shrinking even further today because of the dominance of the top 100 surnames.

“Over time, one name will eventually swamp out others, unless there’s creation of new names,” Mountain says. “In China, you’ve had very little immigration, so you’ve had the introduction of very few new names.”

Unfortunately, the paucity of surnames has also been accompanied by a dwindling supply of given names, the selection of which can be tricky business in China because of political and cultural overtones.

In a holdover from ancient superstitions and Confucian teachings, many parents believe that their child’s fate will be determined in part by his or her given name, so they stick with safe bets like Ying for boys (“clever”) or Shuzhen for girls (“precious maiden”).

The result: an estimated 4,000 men named Zhang Ying in Beijing alone and 13,000 women named Liu Shuzhen.

Need for ‘Right Name’

But utter individuality is not the point of most Chinese names. Equivalents of “Moon Unit” and “Dweezil” would never occur to even the hippest of Chinese parents. In fact, such outlandish names would horrify them.

“According to a Chinese proverb, ‘You have to have the right name to do the right thing,’ ” says Yao Long, 40, a Beijing businessman whose given name means “dragon.” “If you don’t have the proper name, how can you accomplish anything?”

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Chinese parents cannot consult books of baby names, as such tomes are unheard of here. Some settle on names they have heard or read elsewhere, increasing duplication.

Hundreds of Beijingers, like Yao, have sought help over the last six years from “name master” Aixinjueluo Taochun, a self-proclaimed relative of the last emperor who has reverted to using his multiple-character Manchurian name. For $8 a pop, Aixinjueluo will produce a name embodying all the necessary elements--the meaning of the characters, their visual beauty, their sound and their luck quotient--for your child to get off on the right foot in life.

Yao shelled out the cash for a new name for his 4-year-old son, the child formerly known as Xinyu (“new universe”).

He is now Mengjie, based on the name of the ancient philosopher Mencius.

“For everything on Earth, there’s yin and yang, good and bad,” Mengjie’s father says. “I wanted his name to bring him good fortune.”

Others go less for metaphysics and more for politics. Household registration records in China are littered with the cards of people named after historical events or periods.

In the 1950s, baby boys were often dubbed Yuejin, or “Great Leap Forward,” after Mao Tse-tung’s radical program of peasant collectivization. During the U.S.-Korean War, both girls and boys were called Kangmei, meaning “resist America.”

Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 produced a cascade of newborn boys named Weidong (“protect Mao”) and girls named Songze (“praise Mao”).

Ma Wenge, one of China’s Ping-Pong champions, has a given name that literally means “Cultural Revolution”--a good idea at the time, but not so desirable now that the Communist government has officially declared the period a disaster.

‘Something Eternal’

“You should never follow politics to select a name,” Aixinjueluo warns. “You should follow something eternal.”

Scholars have other solutions for choosing original names to avert identity mix-ups of colossal proportions in the future. Ideas include reviving some of the ethnic surnames lost in the Han ascendancy, using both the father’s and mother’s family names when identifying a child and importing foreign monikers transliterated into Chinese.

Pregnant with a baby girl, Zhu Nan and her husband, Xie Jun, both architects, have not yet settled on a name for their daughter. The couple is willing to consider giving her a four-character name but dislike the combination of their surnames.

“Our surnames put together, Xie-Zhu or Zhu-Xie, sound terrible,” Zhu, 27, says. Plus, “a lot of people have told us there’s going to be a problem when she goes to school with a strange name--other kids might tease her.”

Such considerations lead to conservatism among Chinese parents.

Yuan, the surnames expert, acknowledges that new ways of naming children are unlikely to catch on, although efforts at restoring minority names have scored small successes in some areas. The central government, though on the receiving end of some of the mix-ups, has refrained from dictating to citizens how they ought to name their children.

Advocates of change can only hope that stories like that of murder suspect Li Ming will serve as cautionary tales to expectant parents who might otherwise select terribly common names for their progeny.

When police in Shanghai started their search for Li Ming, they found hundreds of people in the city’s household registration records with that name. It took hours to comb through the files and disqualify most of the Li Mings. Even then, their “short list” consisted of 26 men, whom they had no choice but to haul in for questioning.

Word of the inquiry spread through town and reached the pregnant wife of one of the possible suspects. She grew so distraught that her Li Ming might turn out to be a killer that she tried to commit suicide. Her innocent husband returned home from being questioned just in time to rush her to the hospital, where doctors saved both her and their unborn child.

And the guilty Li Ming? He was never caught.