Wow. There are over a billion people China. Of those 1.3 billion or so people, 85 percent of the population share only 100 surnames, according to a nationwide survey conducted by Ministry of Public Security. Current Chinese law states that children are only allowed to take the surname from either their mother or father, but the lack of variety means there are now 93 million people in China with the family name Wang, 92 million sharing the name Li, 88 million sharing the name Zhang, and so on and so forth... This of course, is bound to cause some confusion, and it's only getting worse.
So, in a landmark move to end the madness, Chinese authorities have released a new draft regulation allowing parents to combine their surnames for their children, which could open up 1.28 million new name possibilities: Chinese surname shortage sparks rethink. For example, "a father named Zhou and mother named Zhu could choose to call their child either Zhou, Zhu, Zhouzhu or Zhuzhou." Pretty soon, you're going to start seeing some crazy, interesting names coming out of China, and eventually making their way over to the States. It's like a brand new generation of Chinese names. Imagine, your children could soon be going to pre-school with a kid named John Wutang. Awesome.
