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China’s electronic identity card is used in many public services – Photo: CNN
According to government data, the 5 most popular Chinese surnames represent 30% of the country’s population, or 433 million people.
Out of 1.37 billion people, China has around 6,000 surnames still in use by the Chinese Ministry of Security. Almost 86% of China’s population uses only 100 of these 6,000 families.
For comparison, the 2010 US Census recorded 6.3 million surnames, while the US population was less than a quarter of China. Most of these families register only once.
According to CNN, there are many reasons why China has so few surnames. One of them may be … technology.
China does not always have some surnames. According to Chen Jiawei, a professor of Chinese surnames at Beijing Normal University, the country has more than 20,000 surnames throughout history.
Through a turbulent history of emigration, political conflict and war, many of them have disappeared in China. Furthermore, the ancient ruler’s practice of giving or correcting surnames also contributed significantly to the loss of small lineages.
Still, few families in the world’s most populous country face a new challenge in the digital age.
They are also less digitized
Chinese or Chinese characters are hieroglyphs with many different letters.
According to CNN, with the development of technology, some of them are written in Chinese characters that are too difficult to type on computers. Therefore, many people choose to … change them for convenience.
In the past, people whose last name was difficult to write did not have too many problems because most of the texts and letters were written by hand. However, the rise of technology with a new digital identity system has made writing difficult for these families.
The problem is that not all Chinese characters are encrypted. The Xinhua News Agency noted that in 2017, some 32,000 characters had been encrypted, but tens of thousands of other characters remained.
According to the news agency, as of 2017, up to 60 million Chinese citizens have difficulty writing their last name.
Another factor causing the number of surnames to continue to decline in China is Beijing’s efforts to standardize the language.
Many provinces in China use different dialects of Mandarin. This division is so deep that many regions cannot understand each other’s language.
Consequently, the Mandarin Chinese alphabet was born in 2013, praised by state leaders as “the first step” to standardize Chinese.
This character set consists of 8,000 characters, that is, only a small part of the existing letters in Chinese characters. Still, this script is used in education and training, in books, and in many different types of documents.
This has reduced the alphabet that the Chinese can use to write their names.
