Names have popped up before on here a few times, but never in quite this way before.

If you've done any reading on how names work in China (and yes, you should have, because names are important), you'll know there's the given name (míng), which is like "John" or "Judy," the generation name (banci), which is unlike anything in our culture(s) and is given to all the siblings in one generation of one family (or to arbitrary groups of kids in most Social Welfare Institutes).

And then there's the family name (xěng), which is like "Smith" or "Jones." Except in China, there's only a limited number of "proper" family names, which is why kids from the Social Welfare Institute sometimes get the short end of the stick, being stuck with an obviously made-up, "improper" surname. Like the "Fu" which means "luck" and *sounds* proper but uses the *wrong character,* and marks the institutional kid as a freak.

Like most other limited resources, when faced with a population growing like China's, there's a problem with scarcity. Yep. They're having a name shortage. By law, kids can only take the surname of their mother or father. You can't just make up a name as Americans are prone to do. And I remember one of our facilitators explaining that it was also against the law to give a child more than three names - xěng, míng, banci and that was it. (Although there are various other "official nicknames," called hao, that Chinese folks get from teachers and coworkers at different stages of life.)

(And before American readers get all, "Hey, that's an oppressive level of oppressive oppression over there!" you should know that in Germany, our democratic ally, parents are only allowed to give their children first names that appear on an approved list. No little Moon Units or Jiminy Sebadohs in Deutschland. Cunegonde and Ignatz, however, are A-OK. But I digress.)

Anyway, in China, there are now 93 million people with the last name "Wang," not all of whom are necessarily related to each other in anything but the we're-all-brothers-and-sisters way. And of that 93 million, a whopping 100,000 have the same given name, "Tao." And this in a country where it's considered unlucky or disrespectful to have kids named after dead ancestors (so no Juniors or IIIs in China).

You can see the problem. Say Wang Tao is speeding on a Shanghai highway, gets in a fender bender with Wang Tao and receives a ticket (written by officer Wang Tao), but doesn't pay... and Wang Tao gets the summons, instead of Wang Tao.

Sorry, I won't do that again.

Anyway, the statisticians who discovered the problem have proposed a solution - creating a whole new category of last names made by conjoining the mother's and father's family names. They did the math and figured out that could create almost 1.3 million new possibilities. Be interesting to see if that recommendation gets through the bureaucracy.