WU'S WU

When everybody’s named the same, then who knows Wu’s Wu?

In China every Tom, Dick and Harry is called Li. The number of Chinese named Zhang (88 million) exceeds the population of Germany. There are more Chinese called Chen or Zhou than there are Australians of whatever name. Hence the colloquial expression lao bai xing, “old hundred surnames”, is used in Chinese to mean “ordinary people” or commoners. In the same way that if you shout “Jones” in the garden quad of Jesus College, Oxford, twenty windows fly open, so, if you call out “Zhang Wei” in a street in Beijing, several men turn round.
This proliferation of common names causes difficulty. The police arrest the wrong man of several called Zhang Jun. When schoolteachers call Wei (“Great”) to answer a question, dozens of children reply. When everybody has the same name, then nobody knows Wu’s Wu.
So the Chinese Government proposes to change the law in order to allow parents to create double-barrelled surnames for their children. Chinese surnames are at least five centuries older than British, but they have evolved in much the same pattern. There are toponyms, descriptive names and trade descriptions. Tao means potter, and Wu means shaman. Some describe seniority in the family. Ji indicates the fourth eldest son in a family. Compare philoprogenitive Victorian families with sons called Septimus and Decimus. Chinese nomenclature is less prodigal and prettier than the wilder shores of our Puritan nomenclature, such as Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron.
We congratulate the Chinese for evolving their names naturally, rather than in a digital age giving their 1.3 billion people ever larger numbers.



China Calling-Comment-Leading Article-TimesOnline