Presently, the social problems caused by name coincidence have spread to the census register management, post and telecommunication, bank deposit, medical insurance and other domains. The security of names has drawn widespread attention from society. The name coincidence is overflowing, as exclaimed by some researchers.
One meet-and-greet event was held days ago in Nanchang between the people bearing the same names, whose lives are made different and filled with various sorts of flavors, as a result of the coincidental names. For example, males are arranged to live in female dormitories. The wages are paid to the wrong person. In one class one can find three “self”. All the funny events are caused by the coincidental names. Nevertheless, suppose one name is used among 300,000 people or one is taken for escaped criminal only for bearing the same name, name coincidence is no more fun.
In the first meet-and-greet event held in Bayi Park in Nanchang, of Jiangxi Province, more than 100 people bearing the same names of either Xiongwei or Liufang took participate in. Statistically, only in Nanchang there are altogether 1540 people named Xiongwei, the most frequently repeated one in all the names. Liqiang ranks as the second one, with 1200 owners in number. In this meet-and-greet event, 50 Xiongwei and 40 Liufang or so came together. One Xiongwei coming from one of the trade companies in Nanchang said that there was another Xiongwei in his company. Their wages were often paid mistakenly to the other Xiongwei, which sometimes led to their interpersonal conflicts. A male more than 20 years old named Liufang told us that the first day lodging both at the high school and in the college, he was arranged to put up in the girls’ dormitory.
According to the statistics at the police, there are about 4100 surnames up to now in China. 129 surnames among all the surnames account for 87% of the total population, each of which taking up over 0.1% population. Thereby, as the population with common surnames grows, the possibility of name coincidence increases. It is alleged that at the present time the annual newborns reach 22,000,000 in number. As the names for the babies are usually chosen at will, the probability for people to bear the same names is getting higher and higher. Statistically, Zhangwei is the most highly repeated name, with 290,607 people bearing the same one. The second one is Wangwei, with 281,568 in number. Years ago, a taxi driver called Liu Zuqiang was wanted on line by the police and was arrested twice by mistake, as he bore the same name as that of the criminal suspect. The taxi driver could not but flee his hometown, abandoning his car, only to get away from the endless trouble.
Affected by the traditional conceptions, many characters become the popular choice among many families toward giving names to children, resulting in the high rates of name coincidence. The police hold that to avoid such phenomenon, the parents should better give two given names to the children. Meanwhile, the preferable and commonly chosen ones such as Jun, Tao, Hua, Gang,Ming for boys and Na, Lan, Li, Zhen, Ying for girls should be avoided. Guo Chunming, chief of the census registration section of the department of public security of Jiangxi Province, suggests the related sections set forth the administration regulations toward naming systems in order to play down the overflowing name coincidence phenomenon. Personally, the parents might give four characters to the children. This way, the coincidental rate would be much less. Anyway, the feasibility of my advice remains to be discussed.
—by Weng Xiaomei, FFL, NBU
