Double Handshake

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an article about Chinese people with rare names and pressures in China forcing them to give them up. One interviewee, Ma Cheng, has a very common surname (马) but an uncommon given name, “Cheng,” obscure enough that my character input system doesn’t include it. In a sense, my problem writing Ma Cheng’s name in this blog post is the same one facing China’s Public Security Bureau.

According to the article, as of 2006, the bureau’s computer system recognizes about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters out there. The newspaper then estimates that “at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure names cannot get new (ID) cards.” So, the question: How do you keep track of these people (on ID cards, in police records) in a digital age?

For the government, the simplest and most ham-fisted solution is to tell these people to get a new name:

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.”

You can almost see the NY Times reporters licking their chops.

Naturally, a name change is not an enticing prospect for Ma, who a) has obviously has grown attached to her name and b) would have to deal with the fact that “Ma Cheng” has appeared on everything from her birth certificate to her university diploma.

On the other hand, upgrading the government computer systems would cost millions, and even afterward, those with even more obscure names would still be left out, facing the same problem that Ma Cheng now does.

Quick linguistic aside: In English, you have a 26-letter alphabet, whose combination any data-entry software can handle. The US government, say, would have no logistical problem creating a drivers license for “John Doe” or “Fiaoeadvas Jaosvie.” But, with Chinese, you’re not dealing with an alphabet, but a database of characters. That database does not (and likely cannot) include all the possibilities.

A few thoughts about this dilemma:

First, if the government is willing to put up with the cost and trouble of upgrading a system (questionable), there must be an intelligent solution to this problem. You could devise a system focused on radicals – the smaller, fixed components that make up  characters – rather than the characters themselves. If there was a system in place that allowed you to manipulate and “design” new characters with radicals, that open up a number of new possibilities. For example, Ma’s given name, “cheng” is made up of three 马 condensed and placed in a row. If you took the left portion of a word like “zhou,” 骤, for instance, and repeated it two more times, you could write Ma’s name.

Given my interactions with Chinese PSB officers, though, I wouldn’t expect them to cheerfully take up the task. It would mean more work, more hassle. That’s not a good enough reason for people like Ma Cheng to lose her name, to me.

A second thought was: to be sure, documents like one’s ID card are a big deal; it defines “who you are” in an official sense. But in a practical, day-to-day sense, your ID-card name means almost nothing if you want it to. A Chinese friend of mine dislikes her middle name “gold,” which I didn’t realize she even had until looking at her ID card. I’ve never heard her introduce herself or seen any document of her’s in which it appears. Similiarly, almost everyone in China has a nickname or two, which they go by, even in relatively formal settings.

Any other solutions out there?