Chinese surnames in shortage

by Victoria Revay | June 12, 2007 at 01:17 pm
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This is unbelievable..in China over 1 billion people share just 100 surnames. That means that currently there are 93 million people with the last name Wang, 92 million share the last name Li and 88 million are called Zhang. Current Chinese law states that children are only allowed to take the surname from either their mother or father. Under a new draft proposed by the government, parents would be able to combine their surnames for their children,which could create up to 1.28 million possibilities.
For instance, a father named Zhou and mother named Zhu could choose to call their child either Zhou, Zhu, Zhouzhu or Zhuzhou,
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ryan
ryan
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:24 on June 12th, 2007

Victoria Revay, the numbers are staggering. It's shocking that it's taken this long for the government to react to the problem - imagine the amount of babies that have gone to the wrong parents because everyone had the same name.

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