"Just change your name"

By Fiorella Bafundo

In an article of the New York Times, Sharon Lafraniere talks about an issue in China with the choosing of names for the Chinese population after a new kind of identity card more technologically advanced wants to be implemented by the Chinese government as a way to increase security. The problem that has came up has to do with the fact that as in China 100 last names cover almost 85% of the 1.3 billion people, the lack of individuality has encourage Chinese parents to create new names mixing the ones that already exist or even adding characters from English. The problem is that with this new technology the Chinese government wants to implement, only 32,252 of the 55,000 Chinese characters can be read by the computers, leaving outside the program those who have “rare”, original names such as a girl whose name is Ma Cheng. The argument is that they should change those names because “The computer cannot even recognize them and people cannot read them. This has become an obstacle in communication.”
Ma Cheng “argues that the government’s technology should adapt, not her.” And as she has been having some problems when she went to renew her old ID, she now has a temporary one for three months and thinks she will be going to take it every three months because she considers it is “a small sacrifice for keeping her name.”