Wednesday, June 13, 2007

93 Million Wangs

China has a major last name problem. About 85% of Chinese residents share about 100 last names. Do the math, with 1.3 billion people, about 1.1 billion have the 100 most popular last names, an average 11 million each.
There are 93 million named Wang, 92 million people shared the name Li, 88 million are Zhang. At least 7 other names, including Chen, Zhou and Lin (where's Chang?) are shared by 20 million people each.
At least 100,000 people share China's most popular name, Wang Tao. Remember in China and most other Asian countries the family name goes first.
To alleviate this problem they are letting parents combine their family names to create a new name for their children.
Hopefully a guy named Zucker will move to China and fall in love with a girl named Wang.

93 million other Wangs in China

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