NY Times as usual writes good articles. This time on sth that I have written on - with more facts and figures! I begin to appreciate why it's such a mess when the name shown here is in use now (apparently the first name character, with 3 horses stacked up, means "galloping steeds").China's Public Security Bureau's computers are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, so there's a "digital constraint" in any case with the country-wide replacement of ID cards that will no longer be hand-written (!). With the allowed character set going down to 8,000, there will be more names taken out of the system.
Fascinated by more random stats: 100 surnames cover 85% of China’s population; while 70,000 surnames cover 90% of Americans. At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million, followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. Also, there are nearly enough Chinese named Zhang Wei to populate the city of Pittsburgh!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world/asia/21china.html?_r=1
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