{"id":37681,"date":"2009-04-20T19:10:36","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T02:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=37681"},"modified":"2009-04-20T19:10:56","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T02:10:56","slug":"a-ma-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2009\/04\/a-ma-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ma By Any Other Name &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/04\/21\/world\/asia\/21china.html?_r=1&#038;ref=global-home\">The New York Times<\/a> reports on how the Chinese government is trying to stamp out unique names for bureaucratic ease: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Seeking to modernize its vast database on China\u2019s 1.3 billion citizens, the government\u2019s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.<\/p>\n<p>The bureau\u2019s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards \u2014 unless they change their names to something more common.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>One newspaper reported last week that the list would be issued later this year and would curb the use of obscure names. A government linguistics official told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough \u201cto convey any concept in any field.\u201d About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times reports on how the Chinese government is trying to stamp out unique names for bureaucratic ease: Seeking to modernize its vast database on China\u2019s 1.3 billion citizens, the government\u2019s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5805,5],"tags":[201],"class_list":["post-37681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","category-society","tag-control","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.1 (Yoast SEO v24.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Ma By Any Other Name ...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2009\/04\/a-ma-by-any-other-name\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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