Last September, a Ms. Yan from Jiangsu province regretted more than ever having given her daughter a beautifully unique name—the college senior was unable to register for graduate school due to the rare character in her name(頔, dí, “good, nice”).

Yan’s daughter has had similar trouble buying travel tickets online. Many rare characters can be typed on birth certificates and ID cards, but are not in the national coded character system used by banks, the railway, and the national graduate student database. These institutions may compromise with pinyin or homophones, creating further inconsistency.

Meanwhile, rare-character names are becoming trendy. A first-grade class list posted online September 2019 featured eight uncommon characters in 16 names. To help China’s over 60 million creatively named individuals,delegate Xie Jianhui of the National People’s Congress proposed to update the national coded character set last March, though there have been no further developments since. - TAN YU NFEI (譚云飛)