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Database to Be Available For Parents to Name Babies

Chinese parents may be able to spend less time pondering over names for their babies' names as a result of a regulation on name registrations that is being drafted, a senior public security official revealed on March 17. Instead of using whatever characters they want, parents will be encouraged to choose names from a special database.

Detailed procedures for changing names will also be spelled 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 to "reduce the incidence of use 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 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 characters. Such names, which are unrecognizable by computers, have caused great inconvenience to about 60 million Chinese in their daily lives, especially when they travel, register in hotels or open bank accounts, the ministry said.