According to estimates, in Italy there would be between 300 thousand and 400 thousand surnames different, compared to a population of just over 59 million people. In Chinasince they live there 1.37 billion individualswe could therefore expect a few million different surnames. Instead, this is not the case at all, on the contrary: according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, there would be just 6.150. In particular, the85% of Chineseequal to approximately 1.2 billion individualswould only share one of about 100 surnames and, going into even more detail, the 30% approximately 430 million people of the population would have their surname Wang, There, Zhang, Liu or That. So let’s talk about only 5 surnames (the most widespread) for almost a third of China’s inhabitants. To make an off-scale comparison, in the United States the surnames would be approximately 6.3 million against a population of around 330 million individuals. The reasons The reason why in China, on the other hand, surnames are so few is that they are of a historical, linguistic, socio-cultural and even technological nature.
Why do Chinese people have so few surnames?
There are several reasons why there are so few surnames in China. Here they are:
- Historical reasons: In fact, over the course of its thousand-year history, in China we can trace over 20 thousand surnames. Many are however disappeared due to mass migrations, political unrest and wars. Surnames were often fluid and modified according to the circumstances: rulers and clans adapted them to emphasize their origins, emperors granted them as a sign of favor, some ethnic minorities took on Chinese surnames to integrate into society or were forced to do so. Individual choices, such as simplifying complex characters or seeking a more fortunate surname, also influenced this continuous evolution.
- “Mathematical” reasons: the progressive reduction of surnames then depends on a mathematical effect, called Galton-Watson trialwhich occurs naturally in patrilineal societies: the more time passes (for China we are already talking about thousands of years) and the more, little by little, women take on their husbands’ surnames (losing their own), the more the number of surnames decreases from generation to generation.
- Socio-cultural reasons: internally China is very less ethnically diverse compared to a country like the United States of America (or many others), born from the immigration of peoples from all over the planet.
- Linguistic reasons: while it is very simple to create a new surname starting from a Western surname (Damato, for example, could easily become D’Amato, Damati, Amato even due to simple communication or typing errors at the registry office), the Chinese characters They have a precise shape and meaning and cannot be changed simply by adding a stroke by mistake.
- Technological reasons: the recent one Digitization of the Chinese registryassociated with the existence of many dialects (including, in particular, Mandarin, the official language) and the complexity of the ideograms, has led the Chinese authorities to have to select a huge, but still limited, number of digitally usable characters (we are talking about tens of thousands of characters, but there are hundreds of thousands of variants). This has led to the need to eliminate/transform all those words that contain rare characters that were not selected in the digitalization process. The administration has therefore had to expressly request over 60 million Chinese citizens (roughly equivalent to the Italian population), who had surnames that were much less common than others and with rare characteristics, to choose one of the most shared ones and take it, abandoning their own.
