… although this one’s in China. According to Free Market News, the Chinese government is preparing to restrict parents’ choices of names for their (by law, only-) children. Oddly enough, there is a pragmatic reason given:
Parents in China can no longer name their children anything they want. The government will begin restricting new name registrations to common characters since country-wide electronic identity cards, to be issued in 2008, cannot read obscure characters, according to a report from Australia’s news.com citing a China state media report.
The story quotes Bao Suixian, a deputy director at the Ministry of Public Security, as saying, “We cannot handwrite rare characters on the cards like we did before.”
It notes that Chinese computer databases “often contain fewer than 27,000 Chinese characters while the Kangxi Dictionary, the authority on the language, contains 50,000 characters.”
An editorial posted on Xinhua News says that over 40,000 Beijing residents have not received their official ID cards yet because of this issue. Their conclusion is surprisingly libertarian:
The individuals’ right to name themselves and their children deserves due respect.
Theoretically, they have the right to take whatever characters for their babies’ names as long as they are not obscene, misleading or derogatory.
We are living in an age of technology, which has offered us an onslaught of solutions to our problems.
Why can’t the Ministry of Public Security collect a pool of brains to update a means to input all Chinese characters?
When the pool of characters in computers is big enough, the limit on people’s choice is not necessary.
My conclusions are two: (1) Even the best-intentioned government programs tend in this direction, and (2) we should thank God for our phonetic alphabet.
