Name for baby? Check out national database
By Zhu Zhe (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-17 05:40

Chinese parents may have to ponder less longer over their babies' names with a regulation on name registration being drafted, a senior public security official revealed yesterday.

Instead of using whatever characters they want, parents might choose from a special database.

Detailed procedures for changing names will also be spelt out, Bao Suixian, deputy director of the Public Security Management Bureau under the Ministry of Public Security, told a regular press briefing in Beijing.

He said the aim is to standardize names of Chinese citizens, and especially "reduce the incidence of rarely-used characters."

But how big the database will be or when the draft will be completed was not disclosed.

Chinese parents usually choose the second and/or third characters for their babies, but "strong," "smart," and "wise" for boys; and "pretty," "quiet," and "lovely" for girls are popular, so overlapping names are common.

Figures from nationwide household registration departments show that about 100,000 Chinese share the name "Wang Tao."

To avoid such situations, some parents choose names from the gigantic Kang Hsi Dictionary that lists 50,000 characters while the largest standard computer database contains only 27,000.

Such names, which are unrecognizable by computers, have caused inconvenience to about 60 million Chinese in their daily lives, especially when they travel, register in hotels or open bank accounts, the ministry said.

Names with rarely-used characters also hinder a nationwide programme to replace the first-generation identity cards with intelligent, computer-read cards, Bao said.

At least 40,000 Beijing residents whose names cannot be recognized by computers have not got new ID cards since the replacement exercise started in 2004, according to the city's public security bureau.

The updated ID cards, with advanced anti-forgery and printing features, include an electronic chip to store personal information from computers. "So we cannot handwrite rarely-used characters on the cards like we did before," Bao said.

But he said that a supplementary database containing 4,600 such characters is being installed at local public security bureaus nationwide, which can hopefully resolve the problem.

China has so far issued 103 million new ID cards, and 200 million more are planned for this year, the ministry said.

(China Daily 03/17/2006 page1)